Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Press

“One day I went to school,” Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page recounts to Rock Cellar, “and there was a boy standing up on the school field and he was playing Lonnie Donegan songs on an acoustic guitar, which looked very similar to the one I had at home. A bit more expensive. My guitar looked like it was literally thrown away.”

As with the Beatles, it was skiffle icon Donegan who served as one of Page’s formative inspirations.

“So  we got to talking,” Page continues, “and I said, ‘Well, I’ve got one of those at home.’ And he said, ‘Bring it along and I’ll show you how to tune it.’”

“He showed me how to tune it,” Jim adds, “and he showed me a couple of chords and I think I went home and just kept playing those chords all the time, like a mantra. And it sort of went on from there.”

His parents, Page shares, were supportive: “My father said, ‘Well, as long as you keep up your academic studies, I won’t get in the way.’”

In post-war Britain guitars were expensive, making Page’s learning experience an isolating one.

“There weren’t many guitarists,” he confides. “There was the one at school. But then bit by bit you’d hear about other guitarists and meet other guitarists, but nobody was in a really close proximity to me, because school was quite a way from where I lived. But there was an art college at Epsom. And to cut a long story short, Jeff Beck’s sister was attending that art college and there was a record collector who collected rock and roll and rockabilly records, and they were having a conversation and she said, ‘My brother’s really weird, he only plays records and he’s sort of trying to learn guitar from them, but he’s only got a homemade guitar.’”

“And There was Jeff holding his homemade guitar,” Led Zeppelin‘s guitarist states, “and we just bonded immediately…. We were friends ever since that point. So that’s how we got together. We sort of bonded from that point.”

Leaving school Page played in a number of local outfits before honing his skills as a session musician.

“Curiously enough, I [was] headhunted to play on sessions,” Page reveals. “It was a very, very interesting time, really, because I would go into the session with these guys who were considerably older than I was. I mean, a good seven years older. I would be the youngest one. And they’d give me my chord charts, which I could read. And they’d do a run through and say, ‘Well, play what you want… I was put in with groups and I knew exactly where their point of reference was. So if they had a song which was a sort of R&B, or something that was located from the blues or whatever, I’d notice where they were getting it from. And if somebody said, ‘Well, you know, can you do a riff to this?’ Well, I’d do something in that style, no problem. So it just fell together. If I look back at it, I think, ‘My god, really, it was such a disciplined world.'”

“And,” he muses, “if I hadn’t have been really enjoying it, and delivering on every session, certainly in the early stages when I was doing it, I probably wouldn’t have been seen again.”

Prior to joining and the Yardbirds and later founding Led Zeppelin, Page played on dozens if not hundreds of the prominent singles of the day including songs by The Who, Nico and The Kinks.

“I was doing sessions from 10 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night, five days and six days a week.” he notes “And then I started to try and go back to art college and, you know, it was just like trying to almost, it wasn’t quite like mixing oil and water, but I realized that I was a better musician than what I was a graphic artist, so to speak.”

Page’s choice, it seems, was a good one.

The full interview here.