Led Zeppelin Jimmy Pages' book- This is an excerpt from telegraph.com to read the full article click here
Page’s reputation as one of the pre-eminent figures of Seventies rock rests on his formidable talents as a guitarist, composer and producer. But it has become inseparable – much, one gathers from this book, to Page’s chagrin – from his fascination with the poet, mountaineer and occultist who in his own lifetime earned the dubious sobriquet of “the Wickedest Man in the World”, but whom Page has described as “the great misunderstood genius of the 20th century”.
Page’s association with Crowley, as Salewicz observes, brought “a cachet of sinister glamour to everything Led Zeppelin touched,” and has been cited as the very reason for Page’s towering success. (“Guitar hero makes pact with the devil,” and so on.) In fact, it’s clear from this book that Page would have got on even without any help from the occult.
Ambitious, determined and with a keen interest in making money and holding on to it (Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who turned down the chance to sign the group on the grounds that they were “too dark”, describes him as “always kinda cheap…”), Page was the son of a personnel manager, who abandoned the family in Middlesex when it was revealed that he had been leading a double life, and indeed had even fathered a separate family with another woman.
In 1968, he put together Led Zeppelin, with the objective of forging “a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses”,They became not simply famous, but – much more important at the time – infamous: the epitome of moral dereliction and excess. Page rivalled Keith Richards as a vision of elegant decadence.
Women were subject to multiple humiliations. The drummer John Bonham, a chronic alcoholic and cocaine abuser, was a particularly nasty piece of work. On one flight, Bonham, in a drunken stupor, awoke to find his first-class seat soaked in urine, summoned a guitar roadie from his seat in economy and ordered him to change places. Journalists travelling with the group were given a list of rules that included: “Do not make any eye contact with John Bonham. This is for your own safety.”
Page, she adds reassuringly, “never tried to practise black magic.” But “if a woman had wanted to be beaten with whips, he would have obliged.”
Page’s disappearance into a cloud of heroin addiction (much like Crowley) marked the beginning of the downward spiral for Led Zeppelin, culminating in the group’s final dissolution in 1980 when John Bonham expired choking on his own vomit after a day’s drinking that had begun with a “breakfast” of four quadruple vodkas.
But the book ends with Page happily recovered, enjoying his comfortable twilight years, making the occasional guest appearance on other peoples’ records, feuding with his next-door neighbour Robbie Williams
Jimmy Page by Chris Salewicz
528pp, Harper Collins,
£20, ebook £9.99. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk to order for £16.99
