Tear Down The Walls: Jimmy Page at 80
Our salute to a rock ‘n’ roll visionary
If there is a Mount Olympus for rock guitarists, it’s getting to be a lonely, windswept place for James Patrick Page.
Today, he cruises into his 80s on the wings of a stunning and elegant performance of Link Wray’s “Rumble” at the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame last November.
In 2023 alone, the grey-haired eminence bid farewell to Jeff Beck, one of his oldest friends – and earliest rivals – and Killing Joke’s Geordie Walker, a player Page has admired for decades. Jimi Hendrix is long gone, of course, and we lost Eddie Van Halen back in 2020. David Gilmour (77) and Eric Clapton (78) are still somewhat active but have ceased moving their music forward. More egregiously, Clapton, first of the triumvirate of guitar heroes to helm The Yardbirds, has been pushing unpleasant and harmful theories about vaccines and other hot button issues. Hardly the behavior of a god.
While it’s too reductive to say that Page stands alone on that mythical pinnacle, as there are some brilliant guitarists working today, it is safe to say that Page occupies a unique perch, as much for what he has done as for what he hasn’t. By age 20 he had served a rock ‘n’ roll apprenticeship on the road and established himself as one of the leading guitarists in London’s studio scene, playing acoustic and electric parts on everything from Goldfinger’s classic theme to songs by The Kinks, The Who, Marianne Faithfull and dozens of others less well-remembered. During a brief spell as an in-house producer, he tipped his hand as a sonic architect, shocking the strait-laced engineers by driving Clapton’s guitar into the red on “Telephone Blues” during a session for John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers.
Shortly after that, he joined The Yardbirds, first as a bassist just so see if he liked being in a band, but quickly moving into a twin lead guitar arrangement with Jeff Beck. Though short-lived thanks to Beck’s cantankerous nature, it was enough time for Page to recognize that studio work, with all its compromises, was no longer for him. The Yardbirds themselves, while a mighty force on stage, also faced restrictions in the studio that eventually contributed to their split. Then, in 1968, came the formation of Led Zeppelin, launching one of the most creatively and financially successful bands of all time and writing the names of Page, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and John Bonham in the halls of legend.
Over the course of eight studio albums, Page revealed himself as more than a guitarist but also a musical visionary, through his songwriting and production techniques. His signature sense of dynamics – “light and shade,” as he calls it – is as foundational and inimitable as Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro. On stage, Led Zeppelin was a magnetic force, attracting desperate ticket buyers by the millions on tour after tour. While it’s sometimes remarked that he could be sloppy on stage, Page’s dynamism as a performer is less often recognized these days. There are fewer sights more exciting on YouTube than a clip of Page, in a white suit embroidered with dragons, somehow dancing across the stage while soloing on his double-neck Gibson. In Led Zeppelin’s heyday, the way he moved on stage and enacted the rhythms of his riffs lent a thrill to the sounds exploding off the stage.
VIDEO: Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains The Same
Watching him is also a reminder of the power of Black American music, to which he owes a great debt. It’s one of the wonders of our time on earth, the way these sounds emerged from the Mississippi Delta, leapt across an ocean and infected pasty-faced, middle class Brits like Page with a snake-hipped sensuality. And if the balance of his “tight but loose” approach was sometimes off, that can be attributed to exhaustion, drugs, or just the sheer gusto with which he attacked his solos. As he said on more than one occasion: “I don’t deal in technique. I deal in emotions.”
A band is more than one person, obviously, and the sense of balance between the four members of Led Zeppelin was exquisite enough that it was irreparably shattered in 1980 by the death of Bonham, sending Page into a kind of wilderness. For the next two decades, he wandered from project to project, alternating between seeking a new brotherhood in bands like XYZ, The Firm, Coverdale/Page, and The Black Crowes to having a run at being a solo artist with the Death Wish II soundtrack (1982) and Outrider (1988), both of which have their moments but hardly compete with his prior work.
In any case, the pull of his old band has been impossible to resist, with various reunions of the surviving members attracting a great deal of attention, starting with Live Aid in 1985, and providing only intermittent satisfaction—until 2007, when they flabbergasted the world with the concert that became the Celebration Day movie and album (2012). That performance at the O2 is the most sustained referendum we have of Page’s skills as a musician in the 21st century, an impeccable high-wire act where he, along with Plant, Jones and Jason Bonham only gave themselves one night to get it right – and did they ever! For two hours plus, Page put on a masterclass, crafting solos out of light, shade, and everything in between, and playing those indelible riffs with the fire of first discovery.
There have also been collaborations with Robert Plant, whether mostly reworking Led Zeppelin classics on No Quarter (1994) or coming up with an album’s worth of new songs on Walking Into Clarksdale (1998). The former is an absolute classic, finding Page and Plant as adventurous in their approach to the old material as when they originally created it. The latter is a fine effort, probably mostly remembered for spawning “The Letter,” which Plant presented in a different form on his first hit album with Alison Krauss. However, the fact that neither album is on streaming services suggests at least one of them has some ambivalence about this period of their careers. There was also tension between them when the tour for Clarksdale essentially became “Led Zeppelin redux” as much for economic reasons as anything else, which must have rankled the forward-thinking Plant.
At this late date, even hints from Page of new material or tours have faded to nothing. Aside from Catalyst (2019), a spoken word album made with the poet Scarlett Sabet (also his romantic partner), his extraordinary talents as a producer have lain fallow. In fact, his vision has been mostly retrospective for quite some time. Yet there’s no shame that as his work as an archivist, engineer, and storyteller should rank among his greatest achievements, ensuring that the sound of Led Zeppelin’s recordings have kept pace with technology and maintaining a tight focus on their art rather than their excess through books and box sets.
When it comes to that part of his past that likely includes underage groupies and addiction, Page has been either coy or downright evasive, leaving others to tell those tales with as much sensationalism as they can muster. But those ill-winds seem not to reach him up on Mount Olympus. And while we can still hope for that keen backward glance to turn more fully to Led Zeppelin’s live legacy – there are epochal performances from every tour waiting to be polished up for our delectation – he seems mostly content to just live his life while posting a daily diary of legendary remembrances on his website and social media.
At least with the performance of “Rumble,” which was his first live appearance since 2015, he’ll have something new to add to those “on this day” posts when November 3rd, 2024 rolls around. As he noted of Link Wray’s classic on Instagram, he first heard it when he was 14, “roaring from a jukebox in my hometown of Epsom. As a guitar instrumental the attitude of it was totally unique in its mystery, imagination and execution — it had a profound effect on me.” Many of us can certainly say the same about Page’s own work as we wish him a very happy 80th birthday.
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