Did Jimmy Page really don full Nazi SS regalia on tour?
In the grim history of rock stars flirting with Nazi aesthetics, Led Zeppelin’s guitar maestro, Jimmy Page, can count himself as one of music’s possible worst offenders.
Popular culture began to detach itself from the moral calamity of the Third Reich by the end of the 1960s. During the Second World War, theatres and cinemas across both sides of the Atlantic would routinely show propaganda efforts lampooning the Führer and the Nazi top brass, be it Bugs Bunny tormenting a clear parody of Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring in 1945’s Herr Meets Hare, or Adolf Hitler bonked on the head with a mallet by Daffy Duck two years earlier in Daffy – The Commando.
Yet, any public appetite for targeted japes at Nazi Germany plummeted once the full horrific extent of the Holocaust and its Final Solution extermination policy of the Jewish community, and the so-called “untermensch”, had become apparent. Years would pass before any attempt at turning the Nazis into a punchline would break the historic taboo, Mel Brooks’ deep dive into musical bad taste with the spectacularly awful imagined ‘play-within-a-play’ Springtime for Hitler in 1967’s The Producers, firing off a trend that ‘rediscovered’ the humour to be found in the absurdities of the National Socialist regime’s rhetoric of racial superiority.
From then on, Nazis were fair game in UK sitcom land. Britain’s beloved bigot, Alf Garnett, declared, “We should have joined up with Hitler when we had the chance,” in Till Death Us Do Part, and Basil Fawlty goosestepped around his namesake Torquay hotel while informing his staff not to “mention the war” in front of his sobbing and outraged German guests.
While the comedy world was processing the country’s relationship with the war’s legacy, untangling the knots of the Third Reich’s epochal crimes, as well as touching on the perverse nostalgia that came from a time when the nation enjoyed a burst of patriotic, moral certitude in an existential conflict, the necessary satire and unveiling of social hobgoblins couldn’t be said for the music scene.
On one end was the tasteless but silly, The Sweet bassist Steve Priest, appearing on BBC’s Top of the Pops twice, dressed in SS gear performing ‘Block Buster!’, or punks like Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux seeking to piss mum and dad off with swastika armbands. Others would stray into darker and more questionable indulgences, David Bowie infamously making complimentary remarks on Hitler during his cocaine-blitzed Station to Station era, irresponsibly blurring the lines between art and unvetted private fascination.
Jimmy Page probably lies somewhere in the middle. During rock’s chemical and sexual excesses of the era, one of Led Zeppelin’s so-called “groupies,” Pamela Des Barres, details Page’s alleged penchant for donning full SS regalia in the company of transvestites in her 1996 tell-all Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon. This would supposedly happen every city they played, resulting in nightly shooting up of heroin with drag performers in the venue toilets. Page’s little habit became so wearisome that the tour manager reportedly chained him to the bathroom to curb his drug-induced, SS AWOLs.
Like with much of the 1970s’ rock and roll heyday, many of the sordid tales that surround Page and his ilk are rife with conjecture. He did appear on stage with a suspect Stormtrooper hat at a Chicago show in 1977, adorned with a Reichsadler insignia. When pressed on his motives for a Creem feature in 1985, Page offered little in the way of contrition: “I’d rather have the whole backstage… draped like a Nazi flag, the Confederate flag, the Japanese flag, just so people get sort of shocked out of their inhibitions. Whereby, if they need to, most people don’t have these prejudices. The past is the past, is the past, is the past. But it can shock people, and sometimes people really need to be disturbed.”
Shock has its place, and the use of Nazi imagery or documentation can be wielded as powerful bludgeons against political complacency. However, in the contemporary age, where any claimed ironic distance to the symbols of fascism is shot by an emerging and emboldened Right across the Western world, Page’s SS indulgences are now seen as the exercises in cheap titillation they always were.
We’ll never know if Page went the full SS regalia during those hedonistic days, but, along with Brian Jones’ dismal Nazi photo shoots with Anita Pallenberg, such rock star dallying with The Third Reich’s abominable legacy attests to the eternal need for vigilance against the Far Right’s threat. Simply treating the Nazi era as an aberrational joke serves its insidious rise, as the 4-Chanisisation of conservative discourse worryingly makes clear.
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