"Grouses Of The Holy" - GQ interview with Jimmy Page

2014/12/11 17:38:38

By Chuck Klosterman

Sure, you can ask Jimmy Page about all the groupies and drugs and why Robert Plant seems like such a standoffish dick, but he might throw a television at you. (And then give an answer that's as awesome as it is unexpected.) Chuck Klosterman sits down for a funny, combative, and unforgettable conversation with the only man who loves Led Zeppelin more than he does.

For a 70-year-old wizard, Jimmy Page looks fantastic. Fifteen years ago, he somehow appeared older than he does today. He might be aging in reverse, the best remaining argument for anyone who still believes he sold his soul to the Devil.

We first meet at the Gore hotel, three minutes from Royal Albert Hall and not far from Page's home in Kensington, London. Founded in 1892, the Gore is a sober, erudite inn. (Our conversation takes place in a sitting room filled with multiple sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.) Dressed in black with white hair pulled back, Page is a paragon of restrained dignity. He's the architect of the most important hard-rock band to ever walk the earth, but he looks more like a man who's just finished ratifying the Articles of Confederation. And considering how long it's been since Led Zeppelin's dissolution—thirty-four years ago this month—that's how distant his cultural imprint should feel: It should feel like Colonial history.

Yet this is not the case. Finding Led Zeppelin on the radio today is no more difficult than it was in 1973. If you stroll around the campus of any state college, the likelihood of finding kids wearing Zeppelin T-shirts mirrors the likelihood of finding kids trying to buy weed. This summer, British fashion designer Paul Smith announced the creation of six Zeppelin-themed scarves, independent of the fact that the members of Zeppelin didn't wear scarves with any inordinate regularity. It's beginning to appear that there will simply never be a time when this band isn't famous, even if the genre of rock becomes as marginalized as jazz. Most of that cultural tenacity can be traced to the hydroelectric majesty—and the judicious, acoustic fragility—of the music itself. And most of the credit for that can be directly traced to Jimmy Page.

Page is either the second- or the third-best rock guitarist of all time, depending on how seriously you take Eric Clapton. After a mini-career as a '60s session musician (he's an uncredited guitarist on everything from the Who's "I Can't Explain" to Donovan's "Sunshine Superman"), Page invested twenty-five months with the Yardbirds before handpicking the musicians who would become Led Zeppelin. For the next twelve years, he operated as a perpetual riff machine, re-inventing his instrument and recontextualizing the blues; his influence is so vast that many guitarists who copy his style don't even recognize who they're unconsciously copying. Equally unrivaled is Page's skill as a producer, although this is complicated by his curious homogeneity—he produces only his own work. He also operates at his own capricious pace: Once renowned for his coke-fueled, superhuman productivity (he recorded all of the 1976 album Presence in a mere eighteen days), he's released just five proper studio albums since 1980 (two with The Firm, one with ex-Zep vocalist Robert Plant, another with Plant soundalike David Coverdale, and the 1988 solo effort Outrider). All five would qualify as intriguing disappointments.

Over that same span, Page's central passion has been curatorial, incrementally mining and remastering Zeppelin's catalog in the hope of reflecting his impossibly high audio standards. In truth, that is the only reason Page has agreed to this interview: All the Led Zeppelin albums are being re-released as individual box sets, each containing an updated vinyl pressing of the LP, a compact disc, rough studio mixes and outtakes from the album's recording sessions, a code for a high-definition download, and a seventy-plus-page photo book. They're not cheap (each box retails for over $100), but the sound quality cannot be disputed. And this is the only thing Page really wants to talk about—the sound of the music, and how that sound was achieved. He can talk about microphone placement for a very, very long time. Are you interested in having a detailed conversation about how the glue used with magnetic audiotape was altered in the late 1970s, subsequently leading to the disintegration of countless master tapes? If so, locate Jimmy Page.

If a different musician obsessed over technological details with this level of exacting specificity, he would likely be classified as a "nerd," as that has become a strange kind of compliment in the Internet age. People actually want to be seen as nerds. But that designation does not apply here. Jimmy Page does not seem remotely nerdy. He is, in fact, oddly intimidating, despite his age and unimposing frame. He rarely raises his voice, yet periodically seems on the cusp of yelling.

···

What makes music "heavy"? Its one thing to make music louder, but how do you make music feel heavy?

I don't want to say it's just the attitude, but attitude has a lot to do with it. One of the things that was employed on the Zeppelin records was the fact that I was very keen on making the most of John Bonham's drum sound, because he was such a technician in terms of tuning his drums for projection. You don't want a microphone right in front of the drum kit. Sonically, distance makes depth. So employing that ambience was very important, because drums are acoustic instruments. The only time John Bonham ever got to be John Bonham was when he was in Led Zeppelin. You know, he plays on some Paul McCartney solo tracks. But you'd never know it was him, because of the way it was recorded. It's all closed down. He was a very subtle musician. And once he was introduced to the world on that first Zeppelin album, on the very first track, when it's just one single bass drum—drumming was never the same after that. It didn't matter if it was jazz or rock or whatever: If drums were involved, he had changed them.

I was surprised that in the recent documentary on [Cream drummer] Ginger Baker [Beware of Mr. Baker], he takes some shots at Bonham's musical ability. You just never hear other drummers making that criticism. He's usually so untouchable.

That's an interesting film, because of the way the film starts. Doesn't it start with Ginger hitting the director with a cane? I did see the film, and I know what you're talking about. I was a bit disappointed by that. His criticism was that Bonham didn't swing. I was like, "Oh, Ginger. That's the only thing that's undeniable about Bonham." I thought that was stupid. That was a really silly thing of him to say.
Early in our conversation, I mention Page's use of "reverse echo" on the song "Whole Lotta Love." This is a studio technique in which echo is added to a recording and the tape is then flipped over and played in reverse, allowing the listener to hear the note's echo before hearing the note itself.

So when you used reverse echo on "Whole Lotta Love," were you—

Reverse echo is actually on the first record, too, on "You Shook Me." You can hear it kind of pulsating underneath. Today, you would just reverse the files. But it was more complicated in those days. You had to physically flip the tape over, and you had to convince the engineer to let you do it, because engineers didn't think that way. I'd actually had an experiment of sorts on this with the Yardbirds. In the Yardbirds we had to release singles, which was a total soul-destroyer for the band. But some of the singles had brass instruments on them, so I was trying to make the brass sound like something interesting. So I would put echo on the brass and then play the tape backwards, so that the echo would precede the signal. And I could tell that was a really good idea, so I used that technique across a lot of Led Zeppelin.

But how did you come up with that kind of idea in the first place? Did you start by imagining a sound in your head and then try to figure out how to create it, or did you first come up with the idea of flipping the tape and then just see what happened? Because I have to assume this is a technique no one had ever tried before.

That's true. No one had ever done this. I just thought of it. I would picture it and sort of hear it in advance in my head, and then I just tried to see if it would work. And I obviously knew what tape sounded like when you played it backwards.

···

People still watch The Song Remains the Same, or at least they watch parts of it whenever they're scrolling through the late-night TV menu and suddenly hear a theremin. It is, for reasons both good and bad, the quintessential concert film, created by the kind of super-popular rock band that no longer exists. Led Zeppelin recorded the live footage for The Song Remains the Same at Madison Square Garden in 1973, but the cameras periodically ran out of film and missed certain sections of certain songs. To compensate, the individual band members created interstitial fantasy sequences that were intended to reflect their respective personalities, all of which were varying levels of opaque.

The last time Page saw The Song Remains the Same was June. He was in Japan, and somebody showed him what it looked like on an iPhone. His views on the movie are more positive than they were at the time of its original release, but still lukewarm: He classifies the performances as "good," the fantasy sequences (which were widely mocked) as "diverse," and the overall aesthetic as "quaint." He ultimately concludes, "The film is what it is," which is the critical equivalent of saying "I concede that the film exists." But he also realizes that the appreciation of The Song Remains the Same has inverted itself. For three decades, the conformist opinion was that the movie was essential for its musical content, since this was the only way Zeppelin could be witnessed by anyone who didn't see the band in concert. Nowadays, of course, it has become unfathomably easy to see live footage of Led Zeppelin, on both the Internet and DVD. At this point, there's no period of Zeppelin's musical career that cannot be accessed instantly. If, however, you want to understand how the various members of the group viewed themselves at the apex of their fame, those weird little sequences are as close as you're going to come. The most straightforwardly psychedelic one involves Page: As "Dazed and Confused" drones in the background, we see the 29-year-old guitarist climbing a rock cliff on a moonlit December night, eventually reaching a necromancer who's a decrepit, kaleidoscoped version of Page himself. The footage was filmed on the shore of Loch Ness near Boleskine House, a mansion that had once been the residence of infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley.

2014/12/11 17:57:36

drewfx1

Page is an interesting character - he'd take unbelievable chances at times on stage and just go off, but he's always in complete control in any interview and never lets one go anywhere he doesn't like or say any more than he wants about anything.

2014/12/11 18:35:15

batsbrew

him, and robert johnson.

2014/12/12 04:02:42

craigb

It's not going to fly!

2014/12/12 06:22:15

jamesg1213

'Plant soundalike David Coverdale'

Hmm. Never heard much similarity myself.

2014/12/12 10:45:40

DeeringAmps

Songwriter/Producer extraordinaire! One of the best ever.
Third best British guitarist after Beck and Clapton?
Well, Beck IS the greatest guitarist ever, living or dead; that's indisputable.
Clapton and Pagey?
I guess they are in my top ten...
Just sayin'.
Tom

2014/12/12 10:49:35

jamesg1213

DeeringAmps

Well, Beck IS the greatest guitarist ever, living or dead; that's indisputable.

That's fightin' talk...

2014/12/12 11:09:51

bapu

jamesg1213
DeeringAmps

Well, Beck IS the greatest guitarist ever, living or dead; that's indisputable.

That's fightin' talk...

Yar whar's the Hendrix love?

2014/12/12 11:19:53

jamesg1213

bapu
jamesg1213
DeeringAmps

Well, Beck IS the greatest guitarist ever, living or dead; that's indisputable.

That's fightin' talk...

Yar whar's the Hendrix love?

We should all know by now, there isn't a 'greatest' or 'best'...just your favourite. Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix don't even get in my Top 20.

2014/12/12 11:23:12

bapu

jamesg1213
bapu
jamesg1213
DeeringAmps

Well, Beck IS the greatest guitarist ever, living or dead; that's indisputable.

That's fightin' talk...

Yar whar's the Hendrix love?

We should all know by now, there isn't a 'greatest' or 'best'...just your favourite. Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix don't even get in my Top 20.

Top 40?

"Grouses Of The Holy" - GQ interview with Jimmy Page

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