‘Black Beauty’: The tale of Jimmy Page’s stolen guitar
Being the founder of the 1960s innovative rock band, Led Zeppelin, and one of the most successful international guitarists, it is safe to say that Jimmy Page has had a thriving lifelong relationship with guitars. However, there is a relationship with a particular six-string that shines brighter than the rest, one that endured the ultimate test…the test of time.
The story of Page’s guitar, ‘Black Beauty’, is one of love and loss, and love found once again. ‘Black Beauty’ referred to the 1960 Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty custom, a sleek, electric guitar that was, you guessed it, black. He discussed his feelings with fellow guitar nerd, Chris Bird and Music Radar back in 2020, stating, “The first time I played it, I had such a connection with it. I thought, ‘This is it’. After all this searching and going through guitar shops, ‘this is the one’. I got it before I went to art college, so when I started doing studio work as a session player, that’s the electric that’s used on pretty much all of that work.” This connection is no doubt the source of envy for some, as it’s something that people spend their lives hunting for, and he found it by happenstance, buried deep in a guitar shop.
This connection blossomed as he played it in January 1970 during a historic Led Zeppelin concert at the Royal Albert Hall, one of the most celebrated performances of their career. ‘Black Beauty’ soon gained international status when Page took it on tour with him to the United States, playing it at a show in Minneapolis. Since they were united, they were inseparable. Naturally, he planned to play it in Montreal only a day later, and probably at all the other tour dates too, until it went missing, tragically torn from him somewhere between the two airports.
With no trace of his beloved guitar anywhere, Page had no choice but to get a replacement, and Gibson were able to make a custom version of the one he so adored. However, this replica was made slightly differently, as Page explained, “I had some extra sort of routing in it, because on the original, where you have the up [position on the selector switch], it is the neck [pickup]. The middle isn’t the neck and the bridge; it’s actually the bridge and the middle pickup. And then the down position is the bridge. So at no point could you get what you’d get on a Standard, which was the neck and bridge pickup together, so I worked out a way of doing that, and I had that built into that particular model, because I thought, well, crikey, you want to do that, you want any combination that you can get.”
This version 2.0 stuck around, and it’s the one Page played at the O2 in 2007 for the band’s one-off reunion concert, for the song ‘For Your Life’ from their 1976 album Presence. Only he and fellow guitar nerds could tell the difference between ‘Black Beauty’ and this impostor while the audience looked on, blissfully ignorant of the fact that Page was simply pretending with a look-alike of his lost love.
So, when was love found once again? Well, to his surprise, eight years later, the original ‘Black Beauty’ reappeared and Page learnt what had actually gone down: “It was stolen from the airport and it was stuck under somebody’s bed, somebody who was in some sort of punk band or something, and nobody wanted to rat on him. I think he died, and once he died, things became a bit more apparent as to what had happened, and we got it back”. Despite this act’s callousness, I have to admit, it’s pretty punk to steal Jimmy Page’s most adored guitar.
Reunited after being kept away from each other for 45 years, the story of Jimmy Page and ‘Black Beauty’ is beautifully bittersweet. This tale of a man and his favourite guitar could give any romance novel a run for its money. Nicholas Sparks, watch out!
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