What caused Jimmy Page to stop being a session musician?
Jimmy Page isn’t just one of the most legendary guitarists of all time, thanks to his association with Led Zeppelin. The versatile guitarist has also logged in time in the legendary blues rock outfit The Yardbirds and assembled one of rock’s great supergroups in The Firm. He is also one of the most recorded session guitarists of the early 1960s, having played on songs from The Kinks and The Who to Petula Clark and Shirley Bassey.
After suffering from illness while touring with Neil Christian and the Crusaders as a teenager, Page originally retired from the road to study painting at Sutton Art College. Page still occasionally performed, most notably at the open jams that frequently occurred at the Marquee Club in London. After one of these jams, Page was recruited to play on the song ‘Diamonds’ by Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. Page’s time as a session guitarist began when that song rose to number one in the UK.
By the mid-1960s, however, Page was growing tired of his gig. The lack of freedom he experienced playing other people’s music was starting to affect his mental health. Now a more robust adult, Page had begun to miss being in control of his own music and felt that life on the road was perhaps more sustainable. Although he had previously turned down The Yardbirds’ offer to replace Eric Clapton on guitar when he left the band in 1964, one session caused Page to complete re-examine his chosen work.
“The crunch came this one day I went into this session,” Page remembered in the documentary It Might Get Loud. “I saw this big ream of paper in front of me. I started to get very uncomfortable. There was no run-through: they counted you in, and off you went. It literally was Muzak. I’m not creating anything. I’m interpreting whatever it is that’s written down now, and I’m even doing Muzak sessions. Tearing my hair out.”
It’s not certain what exact session caused Page to call it quits. The guitarist insists that he played on so many sessions over the years that he couldn’t recall most of what he played on. Whatever the final production was, it was only a few weeks after he decided to quit session work that Page learned of a new vacancy within The Yardbirds. Bassist Paul Samwell-Smith left the band to become a record producer, and Page offered to step in. It was the path that would ultimately lead to Page forming Led Zeppelin.
Check out Page playing ‘Shape of Things’ with The Yardbirds down below.
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