The guitar John Paul Jones had made after getting jealous of Jimmy Page
The Jimmy Page double-neck guitar: it’s either the iconic Excalibur of England’s greatest guitar god or an eye-roll-inducing Exhibit A for rock n’ roll’s sad collapse into showy, artless self-indulgence. Either way, the important thing to remember is that there were only two necks on the guitar. And that was very clearly one neck less than a guitar later wielded by Page’s bandmate John Paul Jones, unheralded king of the triple-neck.
For far too long, generation after generation of devoted Led Zeppelin fans have covered their walls with life-size posters of Page and the double-neck while paying comparatively little mind to Jones’ superior trio of fretboards. Why the disrespect and favouritism? What did Page’s axe have that the bassist’s didn’t?
One could argue that when you’re adding necks to a guitar, there is a point at which you’re being practical and innovative, and a further point at which you’re just trying to upstage your friend. They could point to Page as an example of the former and Jones, theoretically, as a bitter and jealous case of the latter. But lest you think the members of the world’s biggest rock band would waste their energies on such a silly, competitive pissing contest, rest assured that both Page and Jones always explained the growth of their instruments—for lack of a better term—as unavoidable necessities of the touring life.
In Page’s case, as he reiterated to Telerama magazine in 2014, the double-neck was the only option if Zeppelin wanted its most popular new song on the live setlist in 1971. “I thought the only way to replicate it properly, to do it any justice, was getting a guitar that will give you 12 strings on one neck, six strings on the other,” he said. “So I got the double neck as a result of recording ‘Stairway to Heaven’.”
It was just a happy accident, then, that the custom Gibson model EDS-1275 double-neck that Page ordered for the job wound up looking like a mythical beast tamed by the coolest elf in Middle Earth. “It’s an impressive instrument,” Page admitted to Telerama. “It looks great. It’s a sexy woman with two necks.”
Of course, the only imaginable thing sexier than a woman with two necks is another nearby woman, on the other side of the stage, with even more necks! And so, our attention returns to John Paul Jones, who, much like Page, was reluctantly forced to pursue a multi-neck chrome siren of his own due to the challenges of interpreting the complex songs of Led Zeppelin IV in a live setting. He observed Page’s “woman,” with its 12-string and 6-string necks, and knew he had no choice but to raise the stakes. “I’m gonna need a mandolin neck on mine!” he shouted to the heavens.
If you want the true sequence of events, it was a talented guitar maker named Andy Manson who conceived of and built the triple neck. According to Manson’s own story, he did so without any direct prompting from John Paul Jones, jealousy-based or otherwise.
“I had done a few repairs and setups for John Paul Jones and was kindly given a complimentary ticket to see Led Zeppelin,” Manson recalled. “I saw John playing a 6-string, 12-string, and mandolin all in the same song, picking up one and putting one down. I thought, ‘shame you can’t hang them all round your neck at once.’ Light bulb on! I designed and made the triple neck and took it to John’s house. I said, ‘Hi John, I thought this might interest you.’ He said, ‘Wow, yes indeed, I can’t wait to see Pagey’s face when I walk on stage with this!’”
OK, so perhaps there was a bit of one-upmanship involved. Nonetheless, the triple-neck entered regular use on Zeppelin’s ‘77 tour and remains–if not as legendary as Page’s lesser model–an cult icon of its own.
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