by Mick Wall
Page merely shrugs when I mention it. ‘It wasn’t modelled on Jeff’s band at all. For a start, Jeff had a keyboard player in his band. He was attempting an entirely different thing. The only unfortunate similarity was that we both did a version of “You Shook Me”. I didn’t know he’d recorded it until our album was already done. You know, we had very similar roots but we were trying for a completely different thing, in my opinion.’
Listening to both tracks now, forty years later, what is most striking is the lack of similarity between the tracks. While the Beck version is short and gimmicky, almost throwaway, the Zeppelin version is almost three times as long, much more portentous, with swampy bottleneck guitar more redolent of the original’s swooning rhythms. Then Page’s guitar solo comes in and it is fluid, haunting, ancient-sounding and mysterious, not bitty or showy like Beck’s. It’s then the thought strikes: Page knew exactly what he was doing. Of course he’d heard the Beck version. This was his hefty riposte. That when he played it to Beck, he was saying: there you go, Jeff, that’s how you do that one. Then probably regretted it when he saw how badly his old friend took it.
For you it wasn’t about rebellion, it was about proving a point. You loved your mum and dad, felt at ease in their comfortable world of net curtains, untipped cigarettes and cups of tea. They never tried to stop you doing what you liked; giving you the front room to play in every Sunday afternoon, when Jeff would come over and you would muck about together on the guitars. Mum would push back the chairs and say ‘Give us a dance, Jim!’ Dad had the same name as you – James Patrick Page – and the same sense of humour. When your driving test came up and it turned out you had a session that day you’d jokingly told him to go in your place and he’d just laughed with you and done it, so at least one of you could drive.
It was a different world to the one they’d grown up in but they didn’t seem to mind, as long as you were happy, and you were. You’d listen to them telling stories about it. How during the war your dad had been a wages clerk, then a manager giving the orders at the aircraft works in Middlesex. Mum was another Patrick – Patricia Elizabeth Gaffiken – a proper Irishwoman who’d worked at the doctor’s surgery as a receptionist, making the appointments, always smiling with a good word for everybody. Well, nearly everybody. They hadn’t been married very long when they found out she was having you. That was when they lived in the old place in Heston, the little gaff near Hounslow Heath. You were a war baby, they said: born 9 January 1944, at the Grove Nursing Home on Grove Road, just up the road from the house. They had you baptised cos that’s what everyone did but they never made you go to church. Mum and Dad didn’t believe in God – not really – and neither did you. Not the old chap with the long white beard, anyway. The only time you even said his name was when something went wrong. Oh, God! Oh, Christ! Oh, bloody hell!
Music wasn’t important, either. There was the radio and later the telly but you never really knew what a record looked like until you were older. No brothers and sisters, either. You were ‘an only child,’ they said, who ‘liked his own company’ and who liked reading and drawing and collecting stamps; an only child who was ‘very mature’ for his age. ‘Jimmy was fun,’ your mum would say, looking back years later. ‘But quiet fun, he wasn’t a screamer” sort of boy.’ Or as you would put it: ‘That early isolation probably had a lot to do with the way I turned out. A loner. A lot of people can’t be on their own. They get frightened. Isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.’
After the war, when Mum and Dad moved from Heston to Feltham, on the other side of the Heath, the noise from London Airport was terrible. Jets would ‘circle the airport. You could hear them going over all the time.’ So Mum and Dad moved again, this time all the way to Epsom in Surrey, where Dad started his own business buying and selling cars – Page Motors. Epsom was where you eventually got your soft Surrey accent, living in the nice new house in Miles Road. It was great – posher than Heston. Nice house, lace curtains, nosy neighbours, playing football and cricket over the park. Summer holidays were best. You would go down to your great-uncle’s farm in Northamptonshire. First time you ever went fishing. And you could muck about with the animals. You really loved the animals.
The rest of the time you were a Pound Lane Primary School pupil. A good boy until you got to twelve and discovered the guitar. Later, you’d boast how ‘I had a really fine education from the age of eleven to seventeen on how to be a rebel and I learned all the tricks of the game.’ But that was just boasting. Really you just liked to show off. You’d take the guitar in knowing the teachers would take it off you and not let you have it back till home time. It was only one of those old Spanish-type jobs with horrid steel strings but when you took it out to the playing fields after school and started strumming all the girls would stand around pulling at their hair, staring at you as though seeing you for the first time. You didn’t even know how to tune it till another boy showed you. Then you got that Play in a Day book by Bert Weedon, but more out of curiosity. You soon forgot about it. Mum and Dad paid for some lessons, too, but that wasn’t any good either. You were always too impatient. There was what the tutor in Kingston asked you to practise and then there was what you were hearing when you played the records. Especially Elvis and ‘Baby Let’s Play House’. Gee whizz! It was so catchy you couldn’t get it out of your head! No drums, just guitars and more guitars; pure excitement and energy, wanting to be a part of it. So you learned to play by ear, starting with the solos, usually Buddy Holly cos they were easiest, just chord solos like ‘Peggy Sue’. Then Johnny Day, who played guitar for the Everly Brothers. ‘Teaching myself was the first and most important part of my education,’ you’d say later, when they asked you about those days. ‘I hope they keep it out of schools.’
Sometimes it would take hours, days even, before you got it but you always got there in the end. After Buddy Holly it was Ricky Nelson. James Burton was his guitarist, you found out. ‘Which was when it started to get difficult,’ trying to do that bendy string style of solo. It was months before you realised ‘you had to remove your traditionally coated third string and replace it with an uncoated one because it was physically impossible to bend otherwise’. No flies on you.
It was better after you’d got yourself the Hofner Senator, with the electric pick-up, bought with the lolly you’d saved up from your paper round. But it still wasn’t what you called ‘a proper electric guitar, which to me was one with a solid body’, so you saved up some more and eventually swapped it for a Grazioso, sort of like a solid-body Strat, except made in Czechoslovakia. Like Hank Marvin from the Shadows with his Antori, sort of. Just plug it into the radiogram and go.
It was all about rock’n’roll. A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop…saving up your pocket money so you could run down to Rumbelow’s in Epsom to buy ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ by Little Richard. Rumbelow’s that sold washing machines and vacuum cleaners down the front and had a little record counter at the back, building up your own collection of 78s. Until then it had all been trad jazz, listening to the Light Programme and the Home Service. Now, all of a sudden, it was about Elvis and Gene Vincent, and before that Bill Haley and Lonnie Donegan. Lonnie was especially good. Skiffle! You loved that! But by the time you were fifteen and thinking about leaving school, it was Elvis and Ricky Nelson, the hard stuff. It was also around now that you first had a go at reading Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley. It wasn’t till years later you really understood what it was about but that was the start. Mainly, though, it was all about the guitar and rock’n’roll, Scotty Moore and his Gibson Super-400 CES semi-acoustic. Rockabilly chording, bent-note solos, the sort of tight interwoven riffing from the guitar and bass that made Elvis shout ‘Yeah!’ Years later, you’d do your own version in your own group and call it ‘Communication Breakdown’…
Other stuff, too, like the jangly sound James Burton got from his Fender Telecaster on ‘Hello Mary Lou’ or Cliff Gallup and Johnny Meeks blasting it out on
‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ or Carl Perkins, who called rock’n’roll ‘a black man’s song with a country man’s rhythm’. You didn’t know about that till later and by then you only had to listen to the way you played to know it was true. The sort of thing that would never go away, so that it was still all there when you came to do your solo on ‘Heartbreaker’ or the chunky der-duh-der-duh riff to ‘Whole Lotta Love’. It was amazing how one thing led to another. How Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’ led to Leadbelly’s ‘Cotton Fields’ how Elvis led to Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup and Sleepy John Estes. How the more you listened and played along, the more it all fitted together in your mind. It was obvious most of it, but no-one except you seemed to know. Not even Mum and Dad…
These were still the days when rock’n’roll was not really allowed. Not in Surrey. These were the days when rock’n’roll were still dirty words; forbidden fruit. Then all of a sudden it was the blues and your mate down the road who had such an amazing stash of those LPs, always asking to let you borrow them, promising to look after them. Blues was so far underground it made even Elvis sound normal. You couldn’t hear it on the radio; you never saw it on telly. You couldn’t even find it in the shops that sold records; didn’t even know the records existed until you held them in your hands, could smell how old and strange they were. ‘When I heard those songs for the first time,’ you’d recall, ‘they really did send chills up my spine.’
Of course they did. At first it was Robert Johnson, then Bukka White, Mississippi Fred McDowell…all the older stuff, just listening to the guitar. Soon it was newer stuff. Muddy Waters, Freddy King, Howlin’ Wolf. Even wilder guitar! Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist was the most! You could play along to that stuff and make your own stuff up on top of it. ‘A good sketchpad,’ you’d call it. And then you found it: where rock’n’roll joined up with the blues. Chuck Berry, Bill Broonzy; the Chicago sound. Everyone else at school was into Cliff and the Shadows, things that ‘sounded like they were eating fish-and-chips while they were playing.’ Music for girls…
Jeff Beck may have got there first in his attempt to form his own band, but there’s no mistaking Page’s belief that he could do better. Speaking in 1976 to the writer Mick Houghton, Beck had had ‘fantastic bands,’ Page said. ‘The early one with Aynsley Dunbar was a brilliant band, but it was his own temperament and the way he treated his musicians which was really outrageous. Sacking and rehiring…purely at Jeff’s convenience. You’re never gonna get the right feeling within the band or the right chemistry when people feel they’re not getting their just deserts. Jeff’s his own worst enemy in that respect.’ But if Page was keen to show he was better than Beck by beating him at his own game, it conversely had the opposite effect, making critics feel he was inferior. Routinely accused by critics, ever since, of taking his cue for Zeppelin directly from Beck’s work on Truth, history has tended to afford Beck the mantle of ‘true original’ while Page has often subsequently been regarded as a mere copyist, or at best a musical arriviste. None of which was actually true. Page may have been permissive when it came to ‘borrowing’ material but the first Zeppelin album exuded the kind of production techniques and musical nous Beck could only hint at with his own, less stable group.
The most blatant steal on the first Zeppelin album, though, occurred on the track most people now remember best from it, and the number, ironically, destined to become one of the most closely associated with Jimmy Page: ‘Dazed and Confused’. Although credited solely to Page, the original version of the song had been written by a twenty-eight-year-old singer-songwriter named Jake Holmes, who Jimmy had seen performing the song just a year before.
Holmes had already tried his hand at various branches of the entertainment industry – from comedy to concept albums – by the time he came to find himself and his two-man acoustic backing band opening for the Yardbirds at the Village Theater in New York’s Greenwich Village one Friday night in August 1967. His solo album, The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes, had just been released that summer. Included from it in his set was a witchy ballad entitled ‘Dazed and Confused’. Although acoustic, it included all the signature sounds the Yardbirds – and later Zeppelin – would appropriate into their versions, including the walking bass line, the eerie atmosphere, the paranoid lyrics, not about a bad acid trip as has long been suggested, says Holmes now, but a real-life love affair that had gone wrong. Watching him perform the song spellbound from the side of the stage that night in 1967 was Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty, and standing next to him, Jimmy Page. McCarty recalls going out the very next day and buying a copy of the Holmes album specifically to hear ‘Dazed and Confused’ again. He claims Page also went out that day and bought his own copy of the album for the same reason.
Given a new, amped-up arrangement by Page and McCarty, with lyrics only slightly altered by Keith Relf, it quickly became a highlight of the Yardbirds’ live show during their last months together. Never recorded except for a John Peel session for Radio 1 in March 1968 just before they left for that final US tour, a version that sounds almost identical musically to the number Page would take full credit for on the first Zeppelin album, but which on the expanded 2003 remastered CD version of the Yardbirds’ Little Games album is credited to: ‘Jake Holmes, arranged by the Yardbirds’ – there was never any question in the rest of the band’s minds over who the song had been written by. ‘I was struck by the atmosphere of “Dazed and Confused”,’ McCarty recalled in a 2003 interview, ‘and we decided to do a version. We worked it out together, with Jimmy contributing the guitar riffs in the middle.’
By the time Page came to record it for the first Zeppelin album, the only substantial change from the version he’d been performing with the Yardbirds just three months before was his own rewrite of the lyrics, including such darkly misogynistic ruminations as the ‘soul of a woman’ being ‘created below’. Other than that, the song stuck to the original arrangement, up to the bridge, where even then the fret-tapping harked back to Holmes’ original. The only other difference of note were the effects Page obtained from sawing a violin bow across the E string on his guitar, creating a startlingly eerie melody full of strange whooping and groaning noises; a trick he had first experimented with in his session days. As if to prove just how indiscriminate he was in his ‘borrowing’, Page followed up the bowing section of ‘Dazed and Confused’ with a series of juddering guitar notes – as Plant over-emotes in a blur of stygian yowls – lifted wholesale from an obscure Yardbirds’ B-side called ‘Think About It’, exhibiting a tendency to recycle his own motifs and ideas as well as others’.
Speaking to Jake Holmes now, he says he wrote ‘Dazed And Confused’ on a college tour just a few months before his show with the Yardbirds. ‘I didn’t think it was that special. But it went over really well, it was our set closer. The kids loved it – as did the Yardbirds, I guess,’ he remarks dryly. He says it wasn’t until ‘way later’ that he first became aware that Page had recorded his own version with Zeppelin – and given it his own songwriting credit. ‘Rock’n’roll was kind of going into its second life when Led Zeppelin came along. I wasn’t fifteen years old anymore so I wasn’t listening to that stuff. I was too busy hanging out at clubs like the Night Owl with the Lovin’ Spoonful, Vince Martin and Cass Elliot.’ So much so, he says his first reaction was to be blasé. ‘I didn’t give a shit. At that time I didn’t think there was a law about intent. I thought it had to do with the old Tin Pan Alley law that you had to have four bars of exactly the same melody, and that if somebody had taken a riff and changed it just slightly or changed the lyrics that you couldn’t sue them. That turned out to be totally misguided.’
Over the years, he says, he has ‘been trying to do something about it. But I’ve never been able to find [a legal representative] who was aggressive enough or interested enough to really push it as hard as it could be pushed. And economically I didn’t want to be spending hundreds and thousands of dollars to come up with something that may not work. I�
�m not starving, and I have a lot of cachet with my kids because all the kids in their school say, “Your dad wrote ‘Dazed and Confused’? Awesome!” So I’m a cult hero.’
In terms of royalties, he just wants a share of the credit, he says, and ‘a fair deal. I don’t want [Page] to give me full credit for this song. He took it and put it in a direction that I would never have taken it, and it became very successful. So why should I complain? But give me at least half credit on it.’ The fact that ‘Dazed and Confused’ was destined to become one of Led Zeppelin’s great set-piece moments, he points out, ‘is partly the problem. [Page] is gonna be so connected to that song by now, it’s like if your baby is kidnapped at two-years-old and raised by another woman. All these years later, it’s her kid. To confess or admit that it’s not is tantamount to admitting that you kidnapped a child. For [Jimmy Page], it’s probably more difficult to wrench that song away from him than it would be any other song. And I have tried, you know. I’ve written letters saying, “Jesus, man, you don’t have to give it all to me. Keep half! Keep two-thirds! Just give me credit for having originated it.” That’s the sad part about it. I don’t even think it has to do with money. It’s not like he needs it. It totally has to do with how intimately he’s been connected to it over all these years.’
