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A pre-Velvet Underground Nico’s first single with a young Jimmy Page and Brian Jones
03.29.2018
11:37 am
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Before she became the Teutonic ice queen chanteuse of the Velvet Underground, Nico, via her then boyfriend Rolling Stone Brian Jones, was introduced to Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and signed to his Immediate Records label, where a young Jimmy Page was employed as house producer, session musician and A&R scout. (Page’s brief career as a session musician saw him adding his distinctive guitar sounds to recordings by The Who, The Kinks, PJ Proby, Lulu, Jackie DeShannon, Van Morrison and Them, Burt Bacharach, French singer Johnny Hallyday, Marianne Faithfull, Vashti Bunyan, Donovan and many others. It’s amusing to think of Jimmy Page being a part of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” single, but there he was. There are several CD compilations of Page’s early session work, probably the best is Hip Young Guitar Slinger.)

Page produced and played on Nico’s sole 1965 single for Immediate, a cover of Canadian folkie Gordon Lightfoot’s “I’m Not Sayin’ ” which was backed by “The Last Mile,” a song composed by Page and Oldham. Jimmy Page plays a six-string in the song, while Brian Jones plays a twelve-string guitar. The single is being re-released by Charly Records in a gatefold sleeve featuring photography by Gered Mankowitz from the original recording session for Record Store Day on April 21.
 

 
A promotional film for “I’m Not Sayin’” was shot at the site of London’s West India Docks (now the considerably different looking Canary Wharf) by Peter Whitehead.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.29.2018
11:37 am
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Chris Farlowe on the birth of British blues, plus exclusive audio of Jimmy Page’s first production
04.14.2017
09:07 am
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The cover of ‘The Beginning,’ courtesy of JimmyPage.com
 
One of the limbs of Osiris could turn up in your mailbox soon. On April 30, Jimmy Page will release the first recording he ever produced, at the age of 16: the 1961 demo of Chris Farlowe & the Thunderbirds, whom he judged “the best band in the south.”

It’s a document of London rock and roll as it existed before the Rolling Stones or the Yardbirds, and you can’t miss the qualities that would have recommended the group to teenage Jimmy Page: the voodoo rhythm section, the shit-hot guitarist, fronted by a conjuror, playing hard, spellbinding blues with restraint, dynamics, control. It’s essentially live; the only studio trickery I can make out, other than Page’s anachronistic decision to record the sounds the drummer was making, is a touch of reverb. As on Elvis’s Sun sessions, the musicians are surrounded by emptiness, as if they are recording in outer space, or Chicago.

Last week, Chris Farlowe graciously spoke to us about the album and the beginning of his career in music. Embedded at the bottom of this post is the premiere of “Let the Good Times Roll,” selected for Dangerous Minds by Jimmy Page.

Why has this taken so long to come out?

That’s a good point. I suppose because Jimmy has been so involved with the beginning of Led Zeppelin, of course, and whatever tours they had to do, and whatever recordings, and whatever they had to do, I suppose it just got bypassed. And it was only about a year ago, I was working with Van Morrison, and someone said, “Van’s got a private party tomorrow night for one of his records, are you coming?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll come along, that’s fine.” So I walked in, and then Van said, “Your mate’s here.” I said, “Who?” He said, “Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page is over here.” I said, “Oh, great.”

So I walked over to Jim, and we said hello and greetings to each other and all that lark, and then I said to Jim, “Jim, what are we gonna do about that bleedin’ acetate that we had done 56 years ago?” And he said, “You’re right, we’ve gotta do something about it, because it’s an important record.” And I said, “Right, let’s do it.”

And then he got his act together and he did it!

Was this something you’d had a copy of all these years?

Yeah. I’ve got an acetate copy, Jim has an acetate copy as well, of course. But I couldn’t do nothing, because we were part owners of it, 50/50, so I had to get permission to do it from him if I wanted to do it on my own—but then again, Jim wouldn’t allow that anyway, because he wants to be involved with it, because he produced it when he was 16 years old.

And people say to me, “How come he was only 16 and he produced this album?” And I say, the man is a genius, I think, because he had the instinct and the foresight to realize that we were a great band, and I’m a good singer. He said, this guy deserves to be put down on record, and it took a 16-year-old boy to do that for me! Which is strange. I don’t think it’s happened ever since, really.

Was he still playing in skiffle bands when you met?

Yeah. I had a band—well, the Thunderbirds, of course, which you hear on that record—and we used to tour, do all the local clubs and the pubs and all that sort of stuff. And we did a place in Epsom called Ebbisham Hall, and Epsom is where Jimmy comes from. So, all of a sudden, look at the side of the stage, and there’s this young dude standing there, listening to my band. And when we come off, he said, “Hello, my name’s Jimmy Page, and I think your band’s fantastic. I like your guitarist, he’s really cool.”

I said, “Yeah, he’s good, isn’t he?” He said, “Cor, dear, he’s so smart, all in black like that—he’s really got a good image.” And he influenced Jimmy Page, you know, my early guitar player did.

Is that Bobby Taylor?

Yeah, Bobby Taylor, who now lives in Los Angeles, funny enough. He left my band and became a TV actor and a film actor, and now he’s got an acting school in LA.

So anyway, Jimmy said, “I love your guitarist,” and he’d keep turning up at gigs, and that’s why he got involved with the band, I suppose.

Was this the first lineup of the Thunderbirds?

Yes, first lineup ever. We had a double bass in the very first lineup, which was the same group of guys; when we were doing, like, rockabilly we had a double bass. And all of a sudden, we thought, Well, rockabilly ain’t gonna really last, you know? Rock and roll’s coming in, so I think we’d better go over to a normal bass guitar instead of a double bass. So the double bass player bought a normal bass, and that was it, really.

Who were your contemporaries? This was before the Rolling Stones had even formed.

Yeah, this was a year before the Beatles ever recorded a record, this was made. I was very lucky. I had a mother who was a pianist, and she used to play the piano in the pubs and the clubs during the war, in London, to all the soldiers. And I used to sit down beside her—four or five-year-old boy at the end of the war—and my mother would teach me Doris Day songs. “Secret Love.” I loved Doris Day, I thought she was fantastic, you know. I still love Doris Day. My very first influence was Doris Day, which is amazing, really.

And then, of course, rock and roll came in, and that was it, then. I went to see the film Blackboard Jungle with Glenn Ford and Vic Morrow as a young kid, and we weren’t allowed in, because it was an X certificate, an adult film. So I slipped in with my father’s overcoat and his hat, to make me look like I was 18 years old. [Laughter]

And, like, that still didn’t work, because when I walked in, the guy on the door would say, “Oi, how old are you?”

“I’m 18.”

“You don’t look 18.”

Keep reading after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.14.2017
09:07 am
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Jimmy Page and the Yardbirds cover the Velvet Underground in 1968
03.02.2017
09:18 am
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In honor of what would have been Lou Reed’s 75th birthday, here’s the Yardbirds covering the Velvet Underground in 1968.

You may recall that Michelangelo Antonioni considered the Velvet Underground for the club scene in Blow-Up before choosing the Yardbirds, but the connection between the two bands does not end there. As I learn from Richie Unterberger, the Yardbirds’ last lineup—the one with Jimmy Page on lead guitar—had “I’m Waiting for the Man” in its repertoire. A recording survives from the May 31, 1968 gig at the Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles, one of the Yardbirds’ final shows.
 

 
“I’m Waiting for the Man” was a forward-looking selection in May ‘68. John Cale was still in the VU; White Light/White Heat had been out for a few months, The Velvet Underground & Nico about a year. Yardbird Chris Dreja, who remembers “hanging out with Andy Warhol at The Factory” on the Yardbirds’ first US tour, suggests the cover was Page’s idea. As a session musician and arranger, Page had worked on Nico’s 1965 debut single “I’m Not Sayin’,” whose B-side, “The Last Mile,” he co-wrote with Andrew Loog Oldham. The following year, as Unterberger points out, the Yardbirds and the VU both played at Detroit’s Carnaby Street Fun Festival.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.02.2017
09:18 am
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Super bizarre fully-functional ‘mermaid’ guitar


The ‘Mermaid’ guitar. Built by world-renowned Luthier, Andy Mason.
 
Andy Mason, the artist and musician responsible for this gorgeous yet completely bizarre fully-functional guitar in the shape of a mermaid, built his first guitar in 1967 using whatever materials he was able to find in his father’s garage. And ever since the incredibly talented luthier (the proper title for person/craftsman who makes stringed instruments), has made everything from lutes to mandolins—as well as a series of guitars for John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page of few of which were of the elegantly showboaty double-necked variety that Page was especially well-known for playing.

Mason’s life-sized “Mermaid” guitar took three years to build and is comprised of nineteen different types of wood and according to Mason requires a guitarist with “sensuous posture” to be successfully played. In 2006 Mason put the guitar up for auction and it was reportedly sold for £5000 or about $9,500 U.S. dollars with half of the proceeds going to Harvest Help, a charitable organization that provides support for farmers in rural Africa. While I won’t be the first person to say that it is an indisputable work of art, it also possesses some odd characteristics, such as a realistic looking face sporting an expression which is unmistakably orgasmic in nature. Also strangely contemplative is how the mermaid/guitar mashup looks while it’s inside its custom case—as it takes on a much creepier vibe because it looks a person being laid to rest inside a coffin. Yikes.
 

 

 
More mermaid after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.31.2017
11:34 am
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The Yardbirds: The legendary supergroup that boasted of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page & Jeff Beck
08.26.2016
03:10 pm
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The Yardbirds are one of those groups who didn’t quite make the jump when the drawbridge goes up between the R&B and “English invasion” beat group era and what came after, i.e the psychedelia and beyond. Very few groups of their vintage did, just a small handful when you think of it—the Beatles, Stones, Who and Kinks obviously come readily to mind—but not the Yardbirds who are often thought of as a mere footnote in the later careers of Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck. The Yardbirds go somewhat a little too far back for many music fans who might otherwise love what’s on offer from them. They are seen ultimately as a B&W era rock act, if you take my point. Unlike one group of their peers—the Pretty Things—they didn’t really last long enough to bloom in that same way, although surely the promise of the Yardbirds flowered within Led Zeppelin, Cream and the Jeff Beck Group (not to mention Renaissance).

But the Yardbirds were an absolutely amazing, astonishing and astounding group. To some, who know “of” them, but not much of the actual music they produced, they have the reputation of being merely a really good English blues band when that’s not even remotely accurate, although this still might be the impression one is left with if you end up introduced to them via a crappy CD compilation (and there are dozens of crappy Yardbirds comps). These guys were insanely great musicians, way ahead of their time, adding exotic instrumentation (sitar, tabla), Gregorian chant, shifting tempos, and screaming and distorted lead guitar solos (and feedback) to the three-minute pop song before any of that stuff was routinely done. Their exemplary mid-60s hit singles are amongst the most innovative and furthest-reaching pop music of its day. Even put up against the measure of what the Beatles were getting up to at the same time, the Yardbirds’ output demonstrated that they could more than hold their own with the toppermost of the poppermost. (Worth noting that the Yardbirds opened for the Beatles at at least one concert in Paris.)
 

 
The Yardbirds (their name a nod to jazz great Charlie Parker) were originally formed in 1963 by lead singer Keith Relf and bassist Paul Samwell-Smith who’d already been in a band together. They were joined by guitarist Chris Dreja, drummer Jim McCarty and the original lead guitarist “Top” Topham, who was then just fifteen and much younger than the rest of them. Top was pressured by his parents to take his education more seriously and he recommended his school chum Eric Clapton to take his place. Within a matter of months of forming, the group was approached by rock impresario Giorgio Gomelsky—who ran the Crawdaddy rhythm and blues club in Richmond—to replace the ascent Rolling Stones as the house band at his hip nightspot. He also became their manager and record producer getting them signed to EMI for Five Live Yardbirds, a recording of one of their sets, featuring blues standards stretched to 5 or 6 minutes with wailing guitar solos and feedback, something they called having a “rave-up.”

Below “Louise” with Eric Clapton on guitar:

 
But when the Yardbirds wanted to do something a little more experimental—like their first hit single “For Your Love”—Eric Clapton got all “blues purist” on them and quit on the very day the single was released, not even agreeing to appear in the promotional film made for the record. Clapton soon joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Jimmy Page by that point a session musician boy wonder of some notoriety was approached to replace Clapton. Page turned them down and instead recommended that they hire Jeff Beck (who can be seen below miming Clapton’s guitar parts in the promo for “For Your Love” filmed soon after he joined the group).
 

 
With Beck in the line-up, the Yardbirds were on fire, turning out several classic hit singles and touring America many times, where they had several hit records. When Paul Samwell-Smith decided he wanted to go off and become a record producer, again the group approached Jimmy Page about joining and this time he agreed to help out, filling in on bass until Chris Dreja could learn the instrument, whereupon Page would switch to guitar. But as fate would have it, there was very little actually recorded with the dual guitar Page-Beck pairing.

The legendary guitar-smashing scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 60s classic Blow-Up used the Yardbirds to represent the violent energy of “mod” London. Originally—and for obvious reasons—Antonioni wanted The Who to do this, but they weren’t available. Eric Burdon turned him down, too. He thought about having the Velvet Underground in the scene but they couldn’t get a working visa in time and it would have been expensive to fly their entire entourage to London. The director thought about using a band called The In-Crowd (later Tomorrow) a group that featured future Yes-guitarist Steve Howe, but they were jettisoned in favor of the Yardbirds at the last minute. Since they’d already made prop guitars to be smashed, you’ll note that Beck is destroying a Gibson 175, the guitar Howe famously uses.

The song they’re seen performing here, one of the rare instances of a dual lead from Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck is called “Stroll On,” a rewrite of their earlier “Train Kept A-Rollin” hit with the lyrics changed by Keith Relf to avoid any legal problems with the original songwriters.
 

 
Plenty more Yardbirds after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.26.2016
03:10 pm
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Led Zeppelin perform their first live set on TV, 1969
05.31.2016
09:56 am
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Led Zeppelin’s appearance on Danish television in 1969 is one of the classic moments of rock music history. It was Zeppelin’s second time on television but their very first playing a full live set of songs in front of a studio audience—they had previously lip-synched to “Communication Breakdown” for Swedish TV.

What is surprising watching this superb concert is the audience’s lack of response to Zeppelin’s fully charged performance. They sit listening intently showing little enthusiasm for what they’re hearing. For guitarist Jimmy Page this sort of apathy was part of the appeal of launching his newly formed band in Scandinavia:

They don’t cheer too madly there, you know? We were really scared, because we only had about fifteen hours to practice together. It was sort of an experimental concert to see if we were any good. I guess.

 
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An advert for Zeppelin’s first gig together as ‘the Yardbirds med Jimmy Page’ in 1968.
 
Zeppelin first appeared under the name The Yardbirds with Jimmy Page at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Denmark on September 7th, 1968. They developed their prowess touring Denmark and Sweden over the following months. However not everyone was convinced of this new band as one Swedish reviewer of their early gigs at the Inside Club in Stockholm noted:

It has been up and down for the Yardbirds. A couple of years ago, they were on top. For a while, a lot of people thought that the Yardbirds would lead the developing English pop but their efforts led nowhere.

The members changed and the Yardbirds currently touring Sweden have very little in common with the original line-up. It is not only the line-up that has changed. The style of music is different, as is the quality - only the name is the same.

Friday night they played the Inside. They were so loud it almost hurt. Sometimes playing loud has an important role in pop, but here it was just superficial effect.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.31.2016
09:56 am
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A groupie’s tales: Pamela Des Barres’ sexy stories of Morrison, Jagger & Waylon, now animated!


 
Pamela Des Barres was the original rock and roll groupie, a founding member of the GTOs (which, as Stanley Booth wrote, could stand for “Girls Together Outrageously or Orally or anything else starting with O”), and lover to Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Gram Parsons, Waylon Jennings, and many others.

The woman can obviously spin a tale, what with several books to her name; her 1987 memoir I’m with the Band is essential reading for anyone interested in the sex lives of major 1960s and 1970s rock stars. (Kirkus called it “a classic account of rampant narcissism among guitar egomaniacs,” which seems about right.)

In this amusing short animated by Evan York, Des Barres tells stories of her sexual adventures as a groupie, including encountering a naked Mick Jagger (she was still a virgin at the time), coaxing Waylon Jennings into his long-haired outlaw phase, and watching as Keith Moon perpetrated an epic prank on a major hotel.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cynthia Plaster Caster, Pamela Des Barres & others in the fascinating 1970 doc ‘Groupies’

Posted by Martin Schneider
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02.23.2016
12:24 pm
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Fire destroys Aleister Crowley’s former home Boleskine House

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A fire has destroyed much of Boleskine House, the former home of occultist Aleister Crowley and later Led Zepplin guitarist Jimmy Page. Firefighters were called to the house situated on the banks of Loch Ness at 13:40. hours GMT today, after flames were spotted engulfing the historic building.

A member of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Services told BBC News:

“A large part of the property has already been destroyed by fire and crews are concentrating their efforts on the west wing of the building.

“Crews in breathing apparatus are using four main jets to tackle the blaze and the incident is ongoing.”

 
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Aleister Crowley bought Boleskine House in 1899—then named the Manor of Boleskine and Abertarff—as he considered the building in the ideal location for carrying out the “Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage” from the grimoire The Book of Abramelin. Crowley said the building fitted the necessary requirements for the rite to work:

...the first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a ‘lodge’ where the spirits may congregate.

For Crowley, Boleskine House was a “Thelemic Kiblah,” a “Magical East” where he could do his thing. The intention of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage is to invoke “one’s Guardian Angel.” The rite takes six months of abstinence and celibacy to prepare for. It is claimed that during the ritual Crowley was called away on an emergency to Paris—leaving the rite unfinished and causing a strange, monstrous disruption to the loch.

...the spirits he summoned got out of hand, causing one housemaid to leave, and a workman to go mad. He also insinuates he was indirectly responsible for a local butcher accidentally severing an artery and bleeding to death. Crowley had written the names of some demons on a bill from the butcher’s shop.

Some have said these “demons” are also responsible for the Loch Ness monster.
 
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In 1970, Jimmy Page bought Boleskine House—which was then in considerable disrepair. Page was fascinated by Crowley’s ideas and had the property renovated—though he rarely stayed at the house. He sold the property in 1992.
 
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In 200, BBC Scotland produced a documentary on Boleskine House Aleister Crowley: The Other Loch Ness Monster, which traced the occult history of the property and the story of the infamous unfinished ritual that unleashed evil forces.
 

 
Via BBC

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.23.2015
05:18 pm
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RIP Twinkle: Nearly forgotten 60s teen pop star, 1948-2015
07.30.2015
01:21 pm
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“I didn’t have an image made up for me by a publicity department. All you saw was what I was. I’m very rebellious, and I was terrible anxious to get in with the fast crowd.”

Some people we think of as being perpetually young, because that’s the sole image we have of them, so it was particularly jarring for me to read about the passing of “Twinkle” at the Ugly Things website over the weekend. She died a few months back, May 21 to be exact, of cancer.

Lynn “Twinkle” Ripley, better known simply as “Twinkle,” was a pretty, blonde, green-eyed teenaged pop star of mid-60s Britain who never really crossed over to U.S. popularity. Her father was a wealthy Tory MP and her older sister, Dawn James, was a well-connected music journalist.  She attended the same posh girls school as Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and the Redgrave sisters. She insisted from the age of six that she was going to be a pop star. Her biggest hit was “Terry,” a sappy, maudlin song she wrote herself. “Terry” tells the tale of an ill-fated motorcycle ride and slightly predates “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las. It’s sung like a very flat Leslie Gore. Twinkle was not blessed in the voice department, clearly.

“Terry” was not based on a true story, but the fact that it was written by teenaged girl (and not a male songwriter channeling one) makes it all the more charming. None other than Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was a session musician on the track. The song reached #4 in the British record charts around Christmas of 1964 despite being banned from BBC radio airplay (and TV’s Ready, Steady, Go) because it was considered in “poor taste.” It’s kind of odd today to consider that when the song was banned, it was being called “sick” and “dangerous drivel” by Lord Ted Willis. Pirate station Radio Caroline continued to play the record.
 

 
Her next song, “Golden Lights,” about being the girlfriend of a pop star (she was, Dec Cluskey of The Bachelors was her then steady) was even better, but reached only #20 on the charts. (“Golden Lights” was later covered by The Smiths and is included in their Louder Than Bombs compilation).  Although she appeared on package tours with The Rolling Stones, Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders and Herman’s Hermits (Peter Noone became her boyfriend for a while), she never really made it and “retired” from the pop world before she turned 18. She later went on to write TV themes and commercial jingles for ATV Music, recording and performing sporadically throughout the decades. Her later life was primarily devoted to campaigning for animal-rights.

Below, a clip of her biggest hit, “Terry”:

 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.30.2015
01:21 pm
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Cheeky, squeaky 19-year-old Jimmy Page talks being a session musician in 1963 interview
06.04.2015
10:03 am
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All those “Very Serious Music Fans” out there tend to be dismissive of former child stars and prodigies, and that’s not entirely unfair, considering what the Mickey Mouse Club hath wrought. The truth though, is that most (all?) great musicians were once little kids. Jimmy Page’s early ventures in skiffle bands (at just 13!) are testament to that. I actually think this brief 1963 interview with him talking about being a session musician is even more interesting though, since you see him developing a musical career with no serious ambitions of stardom.

What’s obvious is how rather unimpressed Page seems to be about the entire matter—demonstrating the sort of teenage flippancy and confidence you’d expect, really. He complains of the older members of the musician’s union keeping him from getting work, he dismisses the big artists he’s worked with as “disappointing,” and he isn’t even particularly forthcoming about his own musical projects. At this point in his life, he’s not even set on being a professional musician—he tells the interviewer he hopes his session work will actually support him as an artist someday. Them crazy kids!
 

 
Via Open Culture

Posted by Amber Frost
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06.04.2015
10:03 am
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Jimmy Page SINGS on his pre-Led Zeppelin solo single, 1965
04.08.2015
12:41 pm
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Encouraged by his then-girlfriend, American pop singer/songwriter Jackie DeShannon, Jimmy Page tried to move beyond his work as a session musician for a bit of the limelight himself. The result was the solo single “She Just Satisfies,” co-written with Barry Mason, which came out on Fontana Records in February of 1965. DeShannon co-wrote the instrumental B-side “Keep Moving” with Page and sang back-up vocals on the A-side.
 

 
Page later remarked to Nick Kent in the pages of CREEM:

“There’s nothing to be said for that record except it was very tongue-in-cheek at the time. I played all the instruments on it except for the drums and sang on it too, which is quite, uh … unique. “She Just Satisfies,” that’s what it was called. It’s better forgotten.”

 

 
Not sure if I agree, it’s a nice Kink-ish curio of Page’s long career. He’s no Robert Plant, but then again he’s no Jeff Beck either... [In actual fact, he sounds like Keith Relf!]
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.08.2015
12:41 pm
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The Unholy Grail of ‘Lost’ Films: Kenneth Anger’s ‘Lucifer Rising’ with Jimmy Page soundtrack
04.17.2014
11:05 am
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Tonight a lucky audience in downtown Los Angeles, seated in the opulent setting of the theatre at the Ace Hotel (once the original United Artists Theatre co-owned by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford) will be treated to a number of Kenneth Anger rarities that have been recently rediscovered and restored by Anger’s producer/manager/collaborator filmmaker Brian Butler. Among them are alternate versions of The Magick Lantern Cycle films and the mind-blowing, but ill-fated collaboration between Anger and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, both famously devotees of Aleister Crowley’s philosophy of Thelema.

The story of their falling out has long been a foundation of the Led Zeppelin mythos: Anger had been living in Page’s Tower House abode in London, editing Lucifer Rising on the same film equipment used on The Song Remains The Same. While Page was on tour with Led Zeppelin, his girlfriend suddenly kicked Anger out, not even allowing him to get his things. A few days later, the mercurial Magus of Cinema threw a hissy over not getting an additional five minutes of music he needed to complete Lucifer Rising when he wanted it, phoned the Swan Song office and “fired” Page—who was in America and apparently mystified by the whole exercise—from the project. Anger did his patented “curse” routine very publicly, going so far as accusing Page of being a mere “dabbler” in the occult and a rich, lazy junkie. Rock journalists at the time began to speculate if Anger’s curse had worked when a succession of tragic events ended Led Zeppelin’s reign as the world’s biggest rock group.

Pages’ Lucifer RIsing score is wonderfully perverse: a languid but steadily building Middle Eastern-sounding drone, festooned with chanting, tabla, screaming mellotron, a sonically shifting low frequency, foreboding ambiance and shimmering 12-string guitar work. It’s a mad, diabolical symphony of beautiful evil; a fascinating piece of unconventional aggressively avant garde music from one of the rock era’s most mysterious living legends. Married to Anger’s imagery, it’s an exquisite aesthetic and spiritual experience.

The world’s two most famous, most artistically high-level Thelemite magicians collaborated for several years and frustratingly, the fruits of that effort have been seen by very few people. And not for four decades at that.
 

 

Over email, I asked Brian Butler a few questions.

How or where did you locate this print?

Brian Butler: I got a call from a storage facility who told me that they had found an “aberated” print of Lucifer Rising. They asked if they should throw it away or if we wanted to keep it. This was a year ago. I was so busy that I didn’t think much of it and put it in storage. Gradually as I started to inventory Kenneth’s archive I found old press clippings and film programs. I found it interesting how meticulous he was in curating a unique experience for the audience. In 1966 he began screening his films as The Magick Lantern Cycle and designed a thirteen-page booklet with a different color for each page. He also recut Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome as the “Sacred Mushroom Edition” for this occasion. In the audience notes were included specific instructions on when to take LSD (still legal at the time) to time it for that film.

I started to notice how The Magick Lantern Cycle evolved in the early 1970s with different versions of Lucifer Rising. It’s seems he began including this in the program as he was shooting it—“Lucifer Rising Chapter One” was shown in 1970—and he experimented with various soundtracks including Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother.

Eventually Jimmy Page came onboard in 1973. For someone of the stature that Jimmy Page had reached in 1973 it was quite radical to do an avant garde soundtrack strictly as an artistic endeavor, although Mick Jagger did the Moog soundtrack for Kenneth’s Invocation of My Demon Brother in 1969. They worked together for several years with at least two different versions being produced, one in 1974 and one in 1975.

Which one is this?

Brian Butler: After a lot of research, I found it to be the 1975 version—the most developed of four versions known to exist. It ends with “To be continued” and was obviously a work in progress.

In one interview I found, Jimmy Page refers to when he screened Lucifer Rising in his room hotel room on the sixth floor and seemed delighted that his haunting score terrified guests up on the twelfth floor. He also mentions making a special trip to a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to be sure the music was synced up correctly. The Anger/Page version was exhibited to the public at least a few times, and also privately, for potential investors.
 

 
The Films of Kenneth Anger” will be introduced by the filmmaker and is a co-production of Kenneth Anger, Brian Butler and Cinespia. The former United Artists Theatre is one of the most opulent movie palaces ever built in America. For a while it was owned by freaky TV minister Dr. Gene Scott and basically closed to the public for more than two decades. The Ace Hotel has restored and preserved all the original decorations, murals and mirrored ceiling and Anger’s films will be projected on the theatre’s big screen beneath ornate columns, a soaring gold ceiling and walls in the style of a Spanish Gothic cathedral. (I was there once to see Dr. Gene Scott and even then it was pretty impressive. Restored it should be pretty incredible.)

More information here and tickets here. Apparently it’s nearly sold out, so if you snooze, you’ll lose, be warned.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.17.2014
11:05 am
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Jimmy Page: Led Zeppelin’s guitar maestro turns 70
01.09.2014
01:54 pm
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Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page turned 70 today. Looking at recent pictures of the man, it seems within the realm of occult possibility that the maestro made a Faustian bargain to retain his good looks into his old age (Actually considering the amount of debauched mileage Page’s body has been put through over the decades, Dorian Gray is perhaps a more appropriate fictional name to evoke.)

Look at that unlined face. For a guy his age, he looks great, but for a guy his age who lived through the excess of Led Zeppelin, it’s doubly impressive. Look at Keith Richards for contrast. In the footage shot at the O2 Arena Led Zeppelin reunion in 2007 (and later released as the incredible Celebration Day), Page was every bit the guitar-wielding marauder of his younger days.
 

 
I had the great pleasure of meeting Jimmy Page once. He’s a very elegant dude, and very friendly, putting me immediately at ease with the information that both his wife and a friend had gifted him with my Book of Lies occult anthology for Christmas that year. I’m not going to pretend like that wasn’t a thrill… because it was.

The unused Jimmy Page score for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising:

 
“Train Kept A Rollin’” with The Yardbirds.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.09.2014
01:54 pm
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Jimmy Page on the art of songwriting, a Dangerous Minds exclusive
09.19.2013
02:37 pm
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The following is an exclusive extract from Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters, a superb new book by Daniel Rachel published this month by Picador. Inspired by Paul Zollo’s seminal Songwriters on Songwriting, Rachel has managed to bring together a truly impressive ensemble of British tunesmiths, including Ray Davies, Jarvis Cocker, Mick Jones, Robin Gibb (why the hell not!) and Johnny Marr, among others. The results are hugely enjoyable, and the mind veritably boggles imagining the kind of cajoling and legwork Rachel must have put in to coax this rich and eclectic ensemble out of their country piles—not least the notoriously taciturn, the notoriously notorious Jimmy Page…
 
Daniel Rachel: Do you have any introductory thoughts about songwriting?

Jimmy Page: I know what my contribution is and I know how that kicks off in the early stages. Coming from the guitarist’s point of view, I’ll start with the music first. That’s the essence of the key ideas and then I’ll work on those. Sometimes I’ve written the lyrics myself. For example, on the first Led Zeppelin album I had a number of things where I had the chorus, like ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ . . . well, that line gets repeated a number of times so there’s not a lot of lyrics in that (laughs). ‘Good Times Bad Times’ I wrote the chorus. I had the music for it and I was writing for this thing that was going to be put together for the band. The whole thing on ‘Good Times Bad Times’ is recognized by John Bonham’s bass drum, isn’t it? Initially I had a sketch for it and then Robert supplied lyrics to the verses. I was very keen on concentrating on the music, and whoever I was going to be working with, for them to be coming up with lyrics. I didn’t think that my lyrics were necessarily good enough. Maybe they were in certain cases, but I preferred that very close working relationship with whoever was singing, whether it be Robert Plant, Paul Rodgers or David Coverdale. The starting point would always be coming from the music, whether I had written that acoustically or electrically.

Daniel Rachel: It’s very noticeable in your music how song structures seem far more classical than pop in their construction.

Jimmy Page: Well, very much so, because I had very much the view that the music could set the scene. One of the things that you’ll see in the Led Zeppelin music is that every song is different to the others. Each one has its own character; musically as much as lyrically. For example, ‘Ten Years Gone’ or ‘The Rain Song’, which has got a whole orchestral piece before the vocal even comes in. So yes, it was crafted in such a way that the music was really of paramount importance to setting the scene and most probably inspired the singer, in this case Robert, to get set into the overall emotion, the ambience of the track of what was being presented, and then hopefully inspire him to the lyrics.

Often we just had working titles. A good example of this and how it would change and mutate was ‘The Song Remains The Same’ leading into ‘The Rain Song’. The original idea I had for that was an overture—as ‘Song Remains The Same’ is—leading into an orchestral part for ‘The Rain Song’. I had a mellotron and I’d worked out an idea—John Paul Jones did it much better than me—coming into the very first verse. If it’d worked that way there wouldn’t have been any vocal until the first verse, you would have had this whole overture of guitars and then into the orchestral thing that opened up into the first verse. But as it was, when we were rehearsing it then it actually became a song; the structure changed, there was another bit put in and then Robert started singing.That wasn’t a bad idea to have an overture, a whole musical segment that took you into ‘The Rain Song’, but it worked out really well as it was (laughs). Whatever it was you were constantly thinking all the time about it.

Daniel Rachel: Writing in movements was a very unusual step to take as a songwriter, considering Led Zeppelin was preceded by predominantly verse, chorus structures to suit the three-minute single format.

Jimmy Page: Although I’ve already said on the first album there were some choruses there, it got to the point where some of the things didn’t have what you’d call the hook. The reason was we weren’t actually writing music that was designed to go on the AM stations in the States at the time. You had FM, that were called the underground stations, and they would be playing whole sides of albums. Well, that’s a dream, isn’t it?—because people are going to get to hear—it’s not necessarily a concept album—the whole body of work that you’re doing on one side of an album and on the other. That was really a nice way to be able to craft the music into that. It was going to go like that anyway, but it was just really useful. The essence of the contents of these albums was going contraflow to everything else that was going on, and again this was intentional. Whereas on Zeppelin II you’ve got ‘Whole Lotta Love’, on Zeppelin III . . . with other bands it’d be something very close or reflective of if they’d got some sort of hit, and we just weren’t doing that. We were summing up the overall mood and where we were on that musical journey at each point in time.

Daniel Rachel: Did you write songs in sections and then join together collated ideas?

I worked very much in that way. I’d be working at home on various ideas and when we were working on something in a group situation I’d think, ‘Oh, I know what I’m going to put in this,’ if you hadn’t already put it together. Some things, I had them really mapped out, and other things—this is as the group goes on—would be on the spot. ‘Ramble On’ and‘What Is And What Should Never Be’: I had those structures complete.

Daniel Rachel: Can you explain how a riff comes to you?

Jimmy Page: A riff will come out of . . . this whole thing of do you practise at home and all that. Well, I play at home and before I knew where I was things would be coming out and that’s those little sections or riffs or whatever. At that stage it’s selection and rejection. It’s whether you continue with something or you go, ‘No that’s too much like something else,’ and then you move into something else. If you’ve got an idea and you think that’s quite interesting then I’d work and build on it at home. ‘Rock And Roll’ was something that came purely out of the ether. We were working on something else and John Bonham happened to play—just as you do sometimes, because we were recording—this intro from ‘Keep A-Knockin’’ from Little Richard and I went, ‘Oh, that’s it!’—I did this chord and half a riff that was in my head – ‘Let’s do this.’ It was really quick to do and we could write like that.

Get yourself a copy of Isle of Noises right here
 

 
Below, Jimmy Page gets his Chopin on at the ARMS Concert:
 

Posted by Thomas McGrath
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09.19.2013
02:37 pm
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Twinkle: Nearly forgotten 60s teen pop star (+ rare Jimmy Page guitar work)
05.26.2013
06:41 pm
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Lynn “Twinkle” Ripley, better known simply as “Twinkle,” was a pretty, blonde, green-eyed teenaged pop star of mid-60s Britain who never crossed over to U.S. popularity. Her father was a wealthy Tory MP and her older sister, Dawn James, was a well-connected music journalist.  She insisted from the age of six that she was going to be a pop star. Her biggest hit was “Terry,” a sappy, maudlin song she wrote herself. “Terry” tells the tale of an ill-fated motorcycle ride and slightly predates “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las. It’s sung like a very flat Leslie Gore. Twinkle was not blessed in the voice department, clearly.

“Terry” was not based on a true story, but the fact that it was written by teenaged girl (and not a male songwriter channeling one) makes it all the more charming. None other than Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was a session musician on the track. The song reached #4 in the British record charts around Christmas of 1964 despite being banned from BBC radio airplay (and TV’s Ready, Steady, Go) because it was considered in “poor taste.” It’s kind of odd today to consider that when the song was banned, it was being called “sick” and “dangerous drivel” by Lord Ted Willis. Radio Caroline continued to play the record.

Her next song, “Golden Lights,” about being the girlfriend of a pop star (she was, Dec Clusky of The Bachelors was her then steady) was even better, but reached only #20 on the charts. (“Golden Lights” was later covered by The Smiths and is included in their Louder Than Bombs compilation).  Although she appeared on package tours with the Rolling Stones, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and Herman’s Hermits (Peter Noone became her boyfriend for a while), she never really made it and “retired” from the pop world before she turned 18. She later went on to write TV themes and commercial jingles for ATV Music, recording sporadically throughout the decades.

I read on her Wikipedia page that she attended the same girl’s school as Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.
 
Below, a clip of her biggest hit, “Terry”:
 

 
More Twinkle after the jump…

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.26.2013
06:41 pm
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