The one gig that saved Jimmy Page’s career: “Did me a world of good”
No one could have scripted a better band than Led Zeppelin to come out of the 1970s. There had been supergroups before, like Cream, that put together different scale exercises every time they performed, but when Jimmy Page built his band from the ground up, they turned in some of the best music of the 1970s, culminating in rock standards like ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Kashmir’. In the background, though, Page was falling apart, and by the time Zeppelin called it quits, it took one gig to save his life.
Then again, Zeppelin was already a train moving way too fast back in the days of Physical Graffiti. If there had been tales of debauchery before them, Page took it to new heights every night he played, whether that meant drinking as much as he wanted or shoving whatever up his nose to function to get through whatever song he was playing.
Once the group started to work on what would become the tour for In Through the Out Door, everything stopped when John Bonham passed away. Despite seeming like the human embodiment of an ox that couldn’t be beaten, ‘Bonzo’ eventually died after a night of heavy drinking at Page’s house.
Any band member dying is usually like a death in the family, but when Zeppelin called everything off, Page was absolutely shattered. This was the group that helped him realise his greatest dreams, so what is someone supposed to do when their entire livelihood is ripped out from under them?
For the next few months, Page would waste his time drinking and playing guitar before he eventually got an offer to play a gig at the Albert Hall with Ronnie Lane. Although the proceeds would go to the ARMS charity, Page was still reeling from the breakup and was a shadow of what he used to be.
Zeppelin’s tour manager Richard Cole had helped orchestrate the event, but when his wife Marilyn saw Page, he looked like an absolute wreck, saying, “Jimmy looked horrendous. He didn’t have any magic then, I can tell you. That is until he picked up his guitar and started playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’.”
Looking back on it, Page said that this one gig helped remind him that there was life after death for him, recalling, “I just felt really insecure. I was terrified. I lived in a total vacuum. That Ronnie Lane thing did me a world of good. It gave me so much confidence – I realised people did want to see me again.”
From there, it didn’t take long for Page to get a new band, eventually starting up The Firm with Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers. Page was still trying to get over the death of John Bonham, but once he had a new outfit to work with, he wouldn’t be treated like a rock relic anymore. By the time people saw him in the video for ‘Radioactive’, they saw that same kid who started Zeppelin all those years ago still hungry to be one of the best guitarists in the world.
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