Jimmy Page reviews the hit singles of 1969
In 1969, Jimmy Page was fully established. Having finally broken out with the self-titled debut of Led Zeppelin earlier that year, Page was well on his way to becoming a guitar god. He had previously logged time as a session musician and helped guide The Yardbirds through their final lineup, but Page wasn’t nearly on the same level as his peers, like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton.
Starting with Led Zeppelin I, Zeppelin were often subjected to scathing reviews in the music press. It got to be so bad that Page even instituted a boycott, rarely giving interviews. “I didn’t think they had a clue what we were doing, as each album changed in its sort of concept and variety,” Page observed in the documentary It Might Get Loud. “The reviews were terrible. They didn’t understand what we were doing.” Page pointed to a magazine that gave Led Zeppelin IV a one-paragraph review, despite housing some of the band’s best-loved material, as a particularly low point in his relationship with the press.
But early on, Page was willing to play ball with the music papers. He was even willing to dish out some reviews of his own, as he did in the December 27th, 1969, edition of Melody Maker. The paper had a recurring feature called ‘Blind Date’, where musicians would review the latest singles of the day and give their opinions of the music. Page took some time to give his opinions, even though none of the songs that Melody Maker showed him would become classic singles.
First up was the British jazz/pop group The Peddlers and their 1970 song ‘Girlie’. “His voice doesn’t knock me out – it’s always so false,” Page opinioned. “He never sounds convincing. I’ve never heard him sing a note that sounds convincing, but I’ll say that they always try very hard. That organ wah-wah is derivative of The Pretty Things – they did it first. I know they are all good musicians, but they never move me. As far as their following goes, I suppose they have got the agency scene really sewn up – Talk of the Town and Morcambe and Wise Show, etc.”
Page then turns his attention to an old-school single: jazz guitarist Charlie Christian and his collaboration with the Benny Goodman Sextet and Orchestra, ‘Blues In B’. “I know who it is – it must be Charlie Christian if the guy said ‘Charlie!'” Page recognises. “Guitarists from this period could have done a lot more if they had better rhythm sections. All the drummers used to chug along with a two-beat and it makes you wonder how the old guitarists would have sounded with today’s drummers. So much has happened to drumming in the last ten year, and when you get a heavy drummer backing – you just explode.”
Page acknowledges that “Quite frankly I never listened to Charlie Christian much; I listened to Les Paul and all the blues guitarists – B.B. King, Bukka White, and Elmore James, plus all the early rock guitarists.” Almost as if to satiate him, Melody Maker decides to show him singles from both Paul and White next.
First is a pair of Bukka White songs, ‘Bed Spring Blues’ and ‘Aberdeen, Mississippi Blues’. “It’s contemporary and sounds like an old blues singer who has been got together in the studio with a drummer,” Page says before admitting that he can’t place who it is. “It really suffers from modern day recording techniques. For a start, on the old recordings the washboard was right up close to the guitar and I’m sorry to say there’s none of the richness in sound he had before. It’s impossible to recreate the old recording sound because the old equipment has gone.”
Next up are Les Paul and Mary Ford with a trio of songs. “Les Paul – he’s the man who started everything – multi-track recording, the electric guitar – he’s just a genius,” Page gushed. “I think he was the first to use a four-track – or was it an eight-track recording machine? I met him once and apparently he started multi-track recording back in about 1945.” Page compliments the song, even though he says that Ford’s “voice dates them a bit. It’s back to the early fifties and Kay Starr.”
Finally, Page gets his hands on Fairport Convention’s ‘Come All Ye’. “I don’t know who it is, but it’s bloody good,” Page raves. “She’s got a lovely purity to her voice.” Page correctly identifies the singer as Sandy Denny, the same singer who Led Zeppelin would later collaborate with on the Led Zeppelin IV track ‘The Battle of Evermore’.
Check out some of the songs that Page reviewed down below.
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