The mystical guitar Joe Walsh gave to Jimmy Page
The friendship between Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page dates back to the early days of their careers before they’d joined their respectively hugely successful bands. Page was in The Yardbirds when they first met while Walsh was a member of The Jame, and the pair immediately hit it off, changing the course of Led Zeppelin’s career.
When Page was a member of The Yardbirds, they regularly toured the United States, exposing him to new people and sounds. The band would periodically visit Cleveland while in America, where Walsh was based with The James Gang, and he made sure to watch Page’s band whenever they were in town, which led to a beautiful friendship.
While their meetings would be infrequent due to them living on differing sides of the Atlantic, it was always a special occasion when they reunited. Following Led Zeppelin’s explosion after their first album propelled Page into superstardom, Walsh had a gift for his friend, and it would send the English guitarist down a whole new path.
Walsh once recalled to Classic Rock Revisited how he gave Page a Les Paul, which later shaped a string of Led Zeppelin classics, stating: “I pretty much gave it to him. When Led Zeppelin came to play in the United States for the first time, their album had just come out. Jimmy was most known for playing with the Yardbirds. Led Zeppelin was the new band that he was coming back with, and everyone was really excited. The James Gang opened for them for about four or five shows on that first tour, and I got to know Jimmy a lot better than I already had.”
He continued: “Jimmy was really looking for a Les Paul guitar. He had been playing Fenders with a single coil, and it just wasn’t rocking enough for him. He needed a Les Paul for that band. They were not expensive back then, but they were hard to find. I happened to have two, and I gave him one. I sold it for like fifteen hundred bucks or something.”
Walsh added: “I had to fly to New York to give it to him, so I had some expenses. That is the guitar that most of the Led Zeppelin stuff was done on. I just thought that he ought to have one and that I had two and only needed one.”
Page’s version of events differs from Walsh’s memory of the Les Paul handover. In an Instagram post, he revealed Walsh attending a Led Zeppelin performance at the Fillmore East and instructed him to try playing his Les Paul Standard. Although Page owned his own custom Les Paul, there was a magic feel to Walsh’s instrument that he didn’t want to give up.
“I just really enjoyed playing Joe’s guitar, and so I agreed with him that maybe I should buy his Les Paul Standard after all,” Page explained. He continued: “I played the Les Paul on ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘What Is and What Should Never Be’, and that decided it for me: it was definitely going to be the Les Paul from then on. I always wanted to make a change for each album sonically, and that was my first decision for Led Zeppelin II.“
He concluded: “Like I had built Led Zeppelin around the Fender Telecaster, I built the second album around the sonic texture of the Les Paul Standard. Neither Joe Walsh nor I realised at the time just what an important thing he had done by coming along with that Les Paul.”
Listen to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ below, a track born as a result of Walsh’s present to Page.
