Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Press

“All the walls were covered with Mylar because Andy Warhol said that color was the color of speed,” Jimmy Page recounts to Interview Magazine. “And playing down there was Nico and The Velvet Underground. I had an incredible connection with Lou Reed, and we spent lots of time talking.”

“I’d seen The Velvet Underground on more than one occasion,” he continues. “They were almost like a resident band. Andy Warhol was keen for them to be there.”

Page then turns his mind to the group’s debut album, the now iconic The Velvet Underground and Nico: “When I heard the first album, it was just exactly what they were like. They were just like that. It was absolutely phenomenal.”

Page, it seems, was well ahead of the curb, noting that at the time he was seeing them the Velvets the band was only playing to crowds of nine to a dozen people in New York.

“It was so radical, such a radical band,” he reflects. “You know, Maureen Tucker just playing the sort of snare drum. And the fact that there was the electric viola with John Cale. You just didn’t get this sort of line-up. It was really arts lab, as opposed to pop music, this wonderful glue, this synergy between them that was dark. It was very dark.”

Page didn’t meet Andy Warhol at these early shows, but they did later cross paths while Jimmy was touring America with pre-Led Zeppelin outfit the Yardbirds.

“There was a reception for the Yardbirds,”  he remembers. “[Andy] came in, and he was with one other person. I was talking to him, and he said, ‘I just want to feel the band, feel the Yardbirds. I want to feel their presence,’ was the exact quote. We had a conversation and at the end of it he said, ‘You should come to the Factory, and do an audition.'”

Page unfortunately never made it into one of Warhol’s films. “We were working,” he laments, “and I didn’t manage to do that. And then I saw him again in Detroit in ’67, when we were playing there. Andy Warhol was proceeding over this wedding, and The Velvet Underground were there. So, I got a chance to say hello again.”

Given that all this was occurring well before Led Zeppelin’s first record might it be possible that the live-in-the-room feel of Led Zeppelin I could have touched by the influence of the Velvet Underground’s own debut? It’s possible, right?

At other parts of the interview Page also shares thoughts on William Burroughs, Jeff Beck, Brian Jones, Francois Hardy and a new spoken word album titled Catalyst which he produced for partner Scarlett Sabet.