“I would have learned so much”: The guitar legend Jimmy Page never got to see
It is difficult to envision the rock and roll landscape of a parallel universe in which Jimmy Page never managed to get his hands on a guitar.
Going right back to his childhood, there was rarely a moment in which the future Led Zeppelin songwriter didn’t have a six-string in his hands, but his musical development could have been accelerated, had he blagged his way into one fabled gig back in the 1950s.
In this modern digital age, when millions of hours worth of music is available at your fingertips at any given moment, it is easy to forget that, back in the 1950s, access to music wasn’t quite so widespread. Although the rock and roll age was in full swing over in the United States by the time that Jimmy Page reached his pre-teen years, you had to make quite an effort to hear any of that rebellious rock on UK airwaves.
Given that the prevailing method of music discovery during that period was the radio, and the BBC, along with the vast majority of mainstream radio stations, outright refused to play any rock and roll, the only means by which the young people of the late 1950s could discover those groundbreaking artists was through pirate radio. Seemingly, though, stations like Radio Luxembourg were successful enough that they almost single-handedly birthed the UK’s rock and roll age.
When the States caught wind of that bubbling underground rock scene across the Atlantic, the more enterprising artists, like Little Richard and Buddy Holly, started to add the UK to their tour itineraries. Inevitably, then, those early shows ended up becoming defining moments of inspiration for the next generation of British rock and rollers; aside from anything else, it was the first time many of them had ever even seen an electric guitar.
As Page later recalled to Rolling Stone in 2012, “We didn’t need [prosperity], apart from the fact that we needed some to acquire a guitar. Getting a guitar was like dreaming about a Cadillac… It was something you would see on albums by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and Buddy Holly.”
Holly, in particular, was a key figure of inspiration for Page’s generation, making the faraway realm of rock and roll seem far more accessible given his young age and thick-rimmed spectacles – he was an ordinary bloke, so if he could do it, anybody could. Naturally, then, when Holly came over to the UK shores, his shows were the hottest ticket in whichever town he was appearing in. So hot, in fact, that Jimmy Page missed them entirely.
“Buddy Holly came over here [in 1958],” he remembered. “I couldn’t afford to see him.” Even now, with the added context of his own illustrious career as a guitar hero and rock icon, not seeing Buddy Holly still seems to rank high on a list of Page’s greatest regrets.
“I would have learned so much in one evening,” he shared. “I did see Jerry Lee Lewis. That was tribal. He wasn’t a guitarist – he was a pianist. But it was what he represented.”
Thankfully, Jimmy Page did eventually get his hands on an electric guitar, and he still learned a fair bit from the output of Buddy Holly, even if he wasn’t present for those earth-shattering shows in 1958. Without him, after all, Page might never have struck upon the progenitive hard rock mastery of Led Zeppelin’s glory days.
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