The songwriter who blew Jimmy Page away: “Just out of this world”
Despite standing as the paragons of 1970s classic rock, stadium behemoths Led Zeppelin were a group that always had a curious nose for music’s evolving trends around them. Far be it dinosaurs forever stuck in the AOR era, frontman Robert Plant was on record as a fan of alternative-funk-metal hybrid Faith No More in the late 1980s, bassist John Paul Jones would produce Butthole Surfers’ Independent Worm Saloon, and guitarist Jimmy Page was such a fan of industrial-punk juggernauts Killing Joke he even featured in their 2013 The Death and Resurrection Show documentary, having been an associate since the early 1980s.
Such an intrepid embrace of music’s eclectic scope was a must when cutting his teeth as an in-demand session musician. Before joining The Yardbirds, Page had totalled hundreds of credits since first recruited by Decca as a teenager to lay down the rhythm track for Jet Harris and Tony Meehan’s ‘Diamonds’ instrumental in 1963.
From then on, Page lent his guitar chops to some of the day’s biggest names, boasting contributions to acts as disparate as The Who, Shirley Bassey, and Marianne Faithfull, as well as a wealth of stock-muzak and second-rate film scores that became so incessant he called his session gigs quits in 1965.
Before his official join with The Yardbirds, Page was hired by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham to serve as in-house producer and A&R man for his new Immediate Records venture. This resulted in a collaboration with German singer and model Nico, producing her version of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘I’m Not Sayin’ as well as featuring his 12-string guitar.
Paths would later cross. Nico went on to become acquainted with pop artist Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground under his Svengali wing, lending her distinctly Teutonic vocals to several songs at his insistence and notably playing with the band during their performances at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable series of multimedia events. This classic line-up was caught by Page when he was in New York and headed to see the bold new garage art rock in Manhattan’s West Side.
“I went to the Scene Club, which was decorated by Andy Warhol, and it was decorated with Bacofoil on the walls, because he said that was the colour of speed,” Page told Classic Rock in 2020. “And suddenly you hear this band doing this drone stuff, and Lou Reed’s writing was just out of this world. They were just phenomenal, and they sounded just like that first album”.
Released in March 1967, the debut LP The Velvet Underground & Nico existed in a different universe from the ensuing ‘Summer of Love’ that flowered across the West Coast from the countercultural capital of San Francisco. Scoring street-level tales of heroin use, sex work, and sadomasochism, Reed’s acidic riposte to the hippy revolution anticipated punk ten years before its insurrectionary demolition ball, and their avant-garde decadence would prove to be the grubby counter to The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, bought by a lot less people but later proving no less influential.
Page was so struck he pushed The Yardbirds to include a cover of ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ played routinely during their latter sets, serving as the ultimate measure of his respect of Reed and the Velvets’ bold lyrical window into the urban milieu.
