“Keep on doing it”: the song Jimmy Page thought started his career
Not every musician can claim to have the best start whenever they step up to the musical gods. Even though they might have some fantastic moments to work within their early days, it’s anyone’s guess whether they will resonate with an audience or end up being lost in the shuffle with the millions of other artists trying to make ends meet. Although Jimmy Page already had a fine time working in the background of pop music before Led Zeppelin came along, he felt that this song was responsible for his turning to a life of guitar.
Then again, Page was practically born to play the guitar, even if it was only for recreation. When listening to him perform in skiffle groups in the earliest footage of him performing, it’s clear that he already had a knack for playing that went beyond strumming chords, and even if not everything hit the audience in the same way that something like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ would later, it was clear that he had a firm grasp on what rock and roll was supposed to sound like.
But the road to Led Zeppelin, or even The Yardbirds for that matter, didn’t come without doing his session homework. Despite becoming known as one of the greatest guitarists to ever touch the instrument, Page was far better suited to the background in his early days, usually playing the right guitar part behind another legendary artist or trying to complement whatever the rest of the band were doing half the time.
That didn’t only apply to rock and roll songs, though. Looking through what he was playing, hearing him lend his skills to tunes like the theme from ‘Goldfinger’ or some of Donovan’s first major hits was the furthest thing from the fury of ‘Good Times Bad Times’ or even ‘Whole Lotta Love’, but ‘Your Momma’s Out of Town’ by Carter Lewis does have the makings of what Page was all about.
Despite being more or less a simple tune from the era of the British invasion, some stabs on the song feel trademarked for Page at this point. From the slightly dirty tone that he’s getting out of his guitar to some of the subtle licks that he puts throughout the tune, it’s clear that the rest of the band seems to be a vehicle for his guitar and Carter Lewis’s voice most of the time.
Page already had a certain confidence in his playing, but he knew that a lot was riding on whether he got this song absolutely right, saying, “I think it was called ‘Your Momma’s Out of Town’, by Carter Lewis and the Southerners. That gave me the impetus to keep on doing it. If ‘Your Momma’s Out of Town’ hadn’t been a hit, though, I might have abandoned it then and there.”
It’s not like Page didn’t have a good idea of what he wanted to do after playing guitar. In that first live performance, he had said that he wanted to go into biological research following his time playing the guitar, so who knows whether we would have been able to see bold new advancements in technology had the guitar maestro decided to pick up the beaker and leave the six-string behind.
Still, it’s a miracle that ‘Your Momma’s Out Of Town’ managed to give him a new sense of where his career could go. If we had lost Page after that single tanked, chances are the entire music world would have looked completely different.
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