Light & Shade
Conversations with Jimmy Page
by Brad Tolinski
Crown
It’s no surprise to hear Led Zeppelin guitarist/mastermind Jimmy Page admit that drugs were an integral part of his experience with the band. But it is a shock to hear some of the places that led him.
“Part of the condition of drug taking is that you start thinking you’re invincible,” Page says in this new collection of interviews.
“I remember one night climbing out of a nine-story window in New York and sitting on one of those air-conditioning units and just looking out over the city. I thought it might be an interesting thing to do. It was totally reckless behavior. I could’ve died.”
While not one to kiss and tell in too much detail regarding groupies, drugs and the like, he does allude to some of the band’s notorious behavior.
Former tour manager “Richard Cole ran into one of the air hostesses on the Starship recently,” he says, talking about the band’s private plane. “She told him, ‘I made a lot of money off of you guys,’ and Cole asked her how. ‘Well,’ she explained, ‘when people on the plane used to sniff cocaine, they’d roll up hundred-dollar bills to use as straws. Then after they were high or passed out, they’d forget about the money. So we would go around and grab all the money.’ ”
On one tour of Japan, Page says that the band did things “you just wouldn’t believe.”
“There was a night when one of us got our clothes tossed out the window, and that person took advantage of that opportunity to run around on the rooftops of Japan naked,” he says, never identifying the mystery bandmate. “There was another evening when the beautiful hand-painted screens in our rooms were chopped up with a samurai sword.”
But all was not fun and games for the band. Being long-haired rockers, they sometimes ventured into unfriendly territory.
He talks, for example, about the disappointment he felt when he achieved his dream of playing in Memphis, home to much of the blues music that inspired him.
“We arrived in Memphis, and were given the keys to the city because the mayor was astonished at how quickly ‘this Led Zeppelin fellow’ had sold out the local arena,” he says. “We got the keys in the afternoon, but I guess they didn’t like the looks of us. Shortly after, we were threatened and had to get the hell out of town. They didn’t like the long hair at all.”
Page also opens up about how he “borrowed” generously from his blues predecessors in creating Zeppelin’s music, a circumstance that eventually led to several lawsuits.
“I always tried to bring something fresh to anything that I used . . . to come up with some variation,” says Page. “I think in most cases you would never know what the original source could be.”
Unsurprisingly for a band as grandiose as Led Zeppelin, some of their greatest songs emerged from fits of ego and pride. For instance, Page says a comment by Beatle George Harrison helped birth a Led Zeppelin classic.
“George was talking to [drummer John Bonham] one evening and said, ‘The problem with you guys is that you never do ballads,’ ” says Page. “I said, ‘I’ll give him a ballad,’ and I wrote ‘Rain Song,’ which appears on ‘Houses of the Holy.’ ”
So eager was Page to show up the Beatle that he even directly referenced Harrison’s masterpiece, the Beatles’ hit, “Something,” in the song’s first two chords.