The music experience Jimmy Page called “terrifying”
The revolving door of guitarists for 1960s psychedelic group The Yardbirds boasts one of the most impressive alumni in rock history, with virtuosos Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page all members during their initial five-year tenure.
All reaching greater acclaim with Cream, The Jeff Beck Group, and Led Zeppelin, respectively, The Yardbirds proved an invaluable stepping-stone for the three both creatively and as a crucial part of their career trajectory. Learning the inner dynamics of working within a band unit was new to Page, however, whose only credentials prior were copious amounts of session work.
Page had turned down earlier offers to join The Yardbirds to cut his teeth further in the studio, learning the recording techniques which would aid his production chops on later Zeppelin records. Credited on everything from The Kinks, The Who, The Rolling Stones, and even playing incidental guitar on A Hard Day’s Night‘s soundtrack, for every attachment to the era’s biggest names, there was a slew of radio jingles and mediocre TV scores stifling his growing need for experimentation and ceaseless in commercial demand.
Speaking to The Guardian, Page recalled a moment of horror from one humdrum session’s endless schedule triggering his life-altering ‘quit your job’ moment: “It just kept going on, and it was getting really tricky. It didn’t take long to realise it was a muzak session, and I thought, ‘What am I doing here? This is just really not what I’m cut out for’.”
Anxious the ‘muzak’ sessions were sapping his creativity, Page elaborated: “Especially as I’d sort of introduced the overdrive pedal, the fuzzbox, into the whole recording scene and people were using them on stage. I was sort of quite keen on some experimental things like the bow with the guitar, and I thought, ‘It’s time to get out’.”
The Yardbirds’ third offer to join couldn’t have come at a better time. Page was bursting with new ideas and hungry to play with his match, and there was an overlap between his and Beck’s membership. In his element playing live with the group, it was during the recording sessions of 1967’s Little Games that he tested Page’s resolve as a rock ‘n’ roll guitarist.
Recalling in his Light and Shade ‘oral biography’, Page recounted the moment when he thought it all might have been over there and then when cutting the album’s ‘Drinking Muddy Water’. He said: “After we finished the first take, there’s this flat voice that just says, ‘Next’. Honestly, can you imagine, we are playing this blues, having a fucking great time, we’ve got Stu (Ian Stewart) in the studio with us, and all they have to say is ‘Next’. It was quite terrifying, really.”
It must have been particularly bleak receiving such an indifferent response from producer Mickie Most after giving his all, ‘Drinking Muddy Water’ notable for Page’s deft slide guitar as well as Stewart’s piano stomp and Keith Relf’s harmonica work, but Page kept a cool head and forged on with a firm sense of his own rock destiny. Going on to cement himself as one of the most celebrated guitarists in history with Led Zeppelin and producing their string of classic albums, moments of creative stagnation and bouts of professional terror clearly can serve as a powerful motivator for great things.
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