What was the first guitar Jimmy Page owned?
When it comes to guitars, few musicians in history can compare with the collection Jimmy Page has amassed. One of the all-time greats on rock and roll’s key instrument has justifiably gathered together an array of models worthy of his skill and songcraft.
Famously a fan of the iconic Gibson Les Paul, Page bought several models of this guitar during the prime of his career. These included two standard models with different finishes that were his guitars of choice through most of his time playing with Zeppelin. He refers to them as “Number One” and “Number Two” for differentiation purposes. Helpful.
Then there’s the double-necked Gibson EDS-1275, which Page purchased in 1971 specifically with the aim of replicating the multi-textured guitar sound on Led Zeppelin’s recording of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in live performance. Not to mention the three other Gibsons he’s less known for, including the black Les Paul custom that he played with during most of his work as a session musician in the first half of the 1960s.
It wasn’t all about Gisbons, though. Page has helped himself to a fair few Fender guitars as well. Most notably, his legendary Telecaster, known as the “Dragon Tele”, was gifted to him by Jeff Beck when he joined The Yardbirds in 1966. At some point in his pre-Zeppelin days, Page daubed the body of the guitar in psychedelic paint patterns and glued circular mirrors around the bridge and pickups in a nod to Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett.
Going back even further in time, a teenage Page bought himself a Gretsch Country Gentleman to see in the ‘60s but had discarded the guitar by the time his recording career began. It wasn’t the first model of the instrument he purchased, either.
What came first, then?
As far back as April 1957, a 13-year-old Page could be seen strumming away on an acoustic guitar on BBC television. He and his skiffle group played two covers on the show All Your Own, with Page playing the Höfner President guitar he’d bought the previous year. He’d saved up all the money he earned from a job delivering milk the previous summer to purchase the instrument.
The Höfner President was really a semi-acoustic instrument since it had a pickup that could be plugged into an amp. But Page soon found that it wasn’t amplifiable enough for his needs, and so he bought his first electric guitar. It was the Futurama Grazioso, a cheap imitation of Fender’s Stratocaster that had just come on the market in 1959. Page may have moved on to other instruments soon after, but this was the model that showed Zeppelin’s string-shredder in-chief just how much noise he could make.
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