Mickie Most: the producer who made Jimmy Page want to leave The Yardbirds
The decision for anyone to leave a band is never an overnight choice. Every rock and roll act can feel like a band of brothers after a while, and even if there are things that get on people’s nerves, there’s always that common language that happens every time someone plugs in their instruments and performs together. But even if Jimmy Page felt that he needed a better outlet than The Yardbirds, he knew that there was more than musical directions that forced him out to form Led Zeppelin.
When Page first joined, though, it wasn’t being seen as a long-term venture, either. The Yardbirds had been the next logical step after he had spent years on the studio circuit playing sessions, and now that he could finally spread his wings, ‘Heart Full of Soul’ felt like the natural breeding ground before moving on to better things.
After all, Eric Clapton had long since moved on by the late 1960s to form Cream, and even though Jeff Beck had his own individual style working with them, it was only a matter of time before he started to outgrow the band. But that had less to do with the fellow musicians and more about the mentality of how they worked.
Because when looking at the music industry, there are different avenues that a band could take. There were acts like The Beatles who would keep taking chances on every record and seeing where their muse took them, and then there were acts like The Hollies who had started to fall into the same ho-hum pattern of singles without any substance behind them, and there was no question which option Page catered towards.
But while The Yardbirds did feel like a safe haven for him, their manager, Mickie Most, had something more traditional in mind for their work. Instead of trying to catch up with what The Beatles were doing, he figured it was better to cater to the pop market, always making sure they kept those smiles on their faces and making the most chipper blues rock ever conceived by man.
A lot of those records might have paid off in the short-term for Most, but Page pointed the finger at his manager when it came time for him to move on to Led Zeppelin, saying, “Mickie Most was really, really good in his field. He knew how to do singles. But when we did an album, it was really telling, because Mickie wasn’t interested in albums; he was only interested in doing singles. So, bit by bit, we started to record tracks which we should never have done.”
So, at that point, Page knew that he wasn’t going to get anywhere playing the singles market, and it’s very telling that Zeppelin never even bothered with singles when they started. They preferred to let the albums speak for themselves, and even if ‘Whole Lotta Love’ worked great outside the context of opening Led Zeppelin II, Page always felt the need to make an album statement rather than try to get his point across in a little under three minutes.
That’s not to say that Most was a detriment to Page’s career by any stretch. He was a fine businessman who managed to expose The Yardbirds to different audiences worldwide, but there’s a fine line between someone having the best intentions and those holding you back in the industry.
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