"Good Times Bad Times", Classic Rock, May 2000

Transcribed from Classic Rock May 2000 Good Times Bad Times, pg 42-49.

Part two of Classic Rock’s exclusive interview with Jimmy finds him back home in England, where he speaks for the first time about the end of Led Zeppelin and of what the future now has in store for the legendary guitarist.
Untitled: Mick Wall

Frankly, I have never known him more excited. “Michael Wallus Maximus!” he bellows down the phone at me. “It’s me — James Patrick Page! How the devil are ya?!”

Good, I tell him. But I wouldn’t mind a bit of whatever you’re on. You sound on fire.

I tell you what,” he says excitedly, “I am!”

It is just after noon on an exceptionally sunny Friday in March. Having spent the previous week in New York talking to the world’s press about his new live album with The Black Crowes — “It was unbelievable! Totally electric!” — Jimmy Page is now back home at his not inconsiderable pile buried deep in the English countryside. Back to normal, you might say — or might if this time he didn’t sound so completely abnormal…

In the 12 years since I first met Jimmy Page, he has always been the perfect gentleman rock star: warm, friendly, up for a lark, if larks there were to be had. (And there often were.) As soon as the tape recorder came out through, a different person would emerge. One who would become much more hesitant and guarded in his words. Trying too hard, perhaps, to be too serious. Or, more often than not, just uncomfortable with being grilled yet again about the whys and wherefores of Led Zeppelin: of what was and what, perhaps, should never have been.

Not this time, though. This time it’s different. He’s different. Instead of the usual measured tones, I get a guy so high on life right now he damn near talks my ear off.

“I had a great time over there,” the guitarist continues breathlessly. “I mean, New York is always a trip. Like when I did the Puff Daddy thing [at the Diamond Awards], that was such a trip! Now this is like… well, unbelievable, really. You forget sometimes when you’re back home what an amazing amount of energy there is going on over there. It really charges you up.”

It’s not just the buzz of the Big Apple that’s got him going, though, he says. It’s being back in the spotlight again; right at the forefront of something exciting. Something new.

“I haven’t felt this excited since… well, for a long time,” he thunders on. “It’s the same sort of feeling of when you’re in a band — a real, proper band with chemistry that you can be totally spontaneous and creative with. Because that’s what it’s all about…”

There’s a great deal more of this — “Have you seen the figures on it yet?” he enquires eagerly at one point. “It’s the number one most requested album on the Internet. Absolutely amazing! I read the fax and literally just jumped for joy!” — and it’s clear of the two albums that Jimmy Page has to promote right now — the already much-discussed ‘Live At The Greek’ and the second volume of Led Zeppelin’s recent greatest hits collection, ‘Latter Days’ — it’s the album with the Crowes that’s chiefly occupying his thoughts.

The same, in truth, might be said for the rest of us. For while ‘Latter Days’ contains many fine moments from Zeppelin’s mid-to-late 70s back catalogue, it remains a seemingly incongruous release: 10 tracks — lifted wholesale from the original 54-track ‘Remastered’ box set of 1990 — is hardly expansive in CD terms. Even the allure of a bonus track — a computer accessible clip of the band playing ‘Kashmir’ live onstage during their now legendary five-night stint at London’s Earl’s Court in 1975 — is somewhat dulled by the discovery that it’s actually just the original (albeit remastered) recorded version of the track laid over what appears, for the most part, to be random footage from the gig.

“I know what you’re saying. People in America last week didn’t even know about ‘Latter Days’, he admits. “They were all like, why are you putting this out now? Well because it’s near enough 10 years since that four-CD boxed set came out, so it seemed like a reasonable idea to put this out now.”

“The [‘Kashmir’] clip on ‘Latter Days’ actually comes from a video-feed that we had to the screens we used at the Ear’s Court gigs. I thought we should have screens because by then it was always these really big places we were playing. And with a three-hour set, I wanted people to be able to relax at points and see exactly what it was we were doing onstage. Different guitar fingerings or [drum] stick movements or whatever.”

But why not put out the whole show as a CD? Or even a film? The live 25th anniversary album of the Earl’s Court shows, for example? As any long-time Zeppologist will know from the many bootlegs that have since surfaced, there were several Zeppelin shows of an exceptionally high standard recorded, and in many cases filmed or videoed, over the years — most memorably, their Los Angeles Forum appearances in 1971 and their Japanese tour of 1972. Add to which the existence of a film of both Knebworth shows in 1979 — Zeppelin’s last in England — and surely you could release a whole series of albums that would prove of greater artistic and even commercial interest than this fairly humdrum ‘Latter Days’ CD?

“I know, I know,” he says. “I mean, I agree. Think of 1980 — it’s The Song Remains The Same or nothing. 1990 — The Song Remains the Same or nothing. And now — it’s the same. But I’ve been trying to do something about it since the days of ‘Coda’ [the posthumous album of Zeppelin outtakes released in 1982]. I’ve always wanted to put out a chronological live album of Zeppelin stuff because we’ve got tapes like all the way through the band’s career from the Albert Hall [in 1969] to Knebworth [in ‘79]. There’s some incredibly good stuff from those days that’s never been seen.”

“[Knebworth] shouldn’t go out on its own, though. But, yeah, if we were to do a compilation of live shows, it would be great to have some footage from those gigs. But… I just can’t get the others involved. I’ve tried but… I’ve never been able to get them to agree on anything. It’s always, ‘I don’t look good in this shot’ or silly arguments about which show was better. So… I’ve stopped trying. Time is precious, you know,” he adds, the warmth leaving his voice momentarily.

We have talked many times about this over the years and I am reluctant to try and draw him down those same dark paths again. Nevertheless, the conversation inevitably leads to an enquiry as to where his current on-off relationship with vocalist Robert Plant is at these days. The fact is, as Jimmy has made plain to me on many occasions, if it were up to him, Led Zeppelin would long since have reunited, either with or (most likely) without the late John Bonham’s son, Jason, on drums. Bassist John Paul Jones would certainly be up for it, he thinks. But the sticking point, it seems, has always been Robert.

“There might have been a couple of occasions in the past where we could have got it back together,” Jimmy says now. “And I would love to have done it. But Robert… Robert’s just not interested.”

But why? Jimmy himself is reluctant to say more, but as one insider who did not wish to be named reminded me recently: “The only time Robert Plant stops being the most famous man in the room is when Jimmy Page walks in. He feels he can hold his own — just about — in the Page/Plant set up, but once they put Zeppelin back together, it’s always going to be about Jimmy Page. And [Robert] doesn’t see why he should have to put himself through all that again.”

Indeed, so difficult does Plant appear to find working with Page of late, the last few weeks of their 1998 ‘Walking Into Clarksville’ world tour were cancelled at short notice.

“It got to the point where we finished November before last, in Paris at the Amnesty International concert,” says Jimmy. “We were due to go to Japan and Australia in January [1999] and then suddenly Robert cancelled. He’d decided he didn’t want to do that. Everybody else did. I mean, I was really looking forward to it…”

Again he forces himself into silence. Not just because he’s reluctant to air his dirty laundry in public, but because, if truth be told, Jimmy’s never really stopped being hurt by his former singer’s inexplicable reluctance to really get back together with him. To really go, musically at least, where no one’s gone before, the way they did back in… the old days.

So is that it then, I ask him? Is that the much longed-for Zeppelin reformation officially dead and buried now… forever?

“Well,” he says, still reluctant to admit the dream might finally be over. “I thought we had at least one good album left in us, put it like that. But I just presented scenario after scenario to him and Robert… Robert wasn’t interested. He just didn’t want to know. All we needed to do was get in a room together, there was lots of ideas, things that came up at soundcheck or whatever. There was stuff there, but… it just didn’t happen.”

So how did it end?

“We were supposed to get back together last May, to do some writing. But again Robert cancelled at the last minute. He was like, ‘We can reconvene in August’. Then August came around and nothing happened, so I got in touch and said, I thought we were supposed to be reconvening, you know? But he just… I don’t know. And like I say, time is precious. Now he’s out on his own.”

So it’s never going to happen?

“He said he doesn’t want to sing Led Zeppelin numbers. But I love playing Led Zeppelin music. For me, they were one of the best bands ever and they made some of the best music ever and we should be out there playing it. But I don’t see that it’s ever going to happen again, no. Not now…”

Switching tack, I ask what he thought of John Paul Jones recent ‘Zooma’ album, and the subsequent live shows at which Jonesy threw in the occasional instrumental Zeppelin tune like ‘No Quarter’, ‘Trampled Underfoot’, ‘Black Dog’ and ‘When The Levee Breaks’?

“Yeah, I thought it was good,” he says, recovering his good mood. “John’s doing it, he’s out there playing Zeppelin songs. Why shouldn’t he?”

They’ve always been mates, Pagey and Jonesy. Always had that peculiar musical empathy you only get from two musicians who have spent so many years playing together. I recall seeing them jamming together at a private party one Christmas back in the early 90s and you could tell even in that loose environment that they had a deep, almost telepathic musical understanding.

“I would play with Jonesy again, for sure,” says Jimmy. “The trouble is, if I did stuff with Jon now, it’s going to be like with Robert — it’s Led Zeppelin again. But then, if Robert won’t, maybe that’s the way it’s got to be. There’s definitely a chemistry there, it’s so obvious. When we did the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame show when Led Zeppelin was inducted [in 1995], John got up and played bass with [the Page/Plant band] and it was fantastic. The last time I actually saw him though was when we went to New York for the Diamond Awards last year, and it was really nice. We both went. Robert didn’t…”

As we’re on the phone, I can’t see for myself, but friends say he is looking better than any time since he set out on the road on the last ill-starred Page/Plant tour two years ago. Word round the campfire is that he’s cut down on the booze and smokes and gone out of his way to get more “focused”, in preparation for the blitz of publicity he knew would surround ‘Live At The Greek’.

Not that Jimmy would ever crack on that he might for once in his dancing days actually be contemplating… well, easing up a bit.

“I don’t know about that,” he cackles. ” I think you’re the one that’s quietened down. You must have because I ain’t seen you around any of the places I go, and I’m having myself a good old rock ‘n’ roll time!”

But then, Jimmy Page, bless him, is old school. The man who wrote the book on rock ‘n’ roll excess; you think he’s going to admit to a diet of Perrier and press-ups? Pull the other one, it’s got a moon and some stars on it…

It was strange, that first meeting in 1988. I didn’t really know who or what it was I might meet as the limo that picked me up glided down the M4, out of London and towards the Windsor retreat which Jimmy Page now called home. The same house, in fact, in which John Bonham had died eight years before after another long day and night on the hard stuff; the event which effectively also killed off Led Zeppelin.

Just like ever other old Zep fan, as well as many of the bands that had followed them, I had read and re-read Hammer Of The Gods with a certain admiring awe. To this day, you only have to mention the words ‘Red Snapper’ to elicit knowing laughs from any dressing room in the world.

Unlike most Zep fans though, I had, by then, got to know enough major league rock stars to realise the stories in that scuzzy, often wildly inaccurate little book were hardly unusual for the people and the times it depicted. Sex and drugs and rock and roll… er, weren’t they supposed to be the vital ingredients in every rock star’s story back in the 70s?

No less so in the dastardly decade that followed. Make no mistake, while the public profiles of 80s bands like Whitesnake, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi et al were apparently built around the whiter-than-white twin pillars of working-out and drinking mineral water, the behind-the-scenes shenanigans were just as full-on back then as they had ever been. The only difference was you didn’t talk about it anymore. The spectre of AIDS still hung over everything and it was simply not cool anymore to admit to that kind of private depravity. Not openly, anyway.

No, I was more concerned with the other ‘off the record’ stories I had heard about the bizarre after-life the Zeppelin guitarist had apparently led since the band’s dreadful demise: how Jimmy had literally not touched his beloved Les Paul guitar for three years after Bonham’s death. How he had become a virtual recluse.

Then came the unexpected hook up with Paul Rodgers in the Firm and the start of what would eventually become a long, slow, sometimes painful rehabilitation. He still only came out at night, they said, but Jimmy recorded two albums with the former Bad Company and Free vocalist: ‘The Firm’, in 1985, and ‘Mean Business’, a year later. I reviewed them both at the time and claimed the first fell short of expectations, while the second was a much more ‘rounded’ affair.

Wrong on both counts. In fact, the first Firm album, for me, remains one of the overlooked classics of the mid-80s — burnished with brisk, sometimes jazzy numbers, not least the sublime ‘Midnight Moonlight’ finale — while its follow-up was merely that: a fun but largely formulaic rehash of its predecessor; the band more polished from their long months of touring, but the songs already running desperately short on inspiration.

But if Rodgers and The Firm was largely a compromise for Page — his playing so worryingly understated that at times it was hard to believe this was the same guitarist who had led the mighty Zeppelin through their most majestic moments — it had, he conceded, provided him with “a reason to get out of bed in the morning.”

“It was very much Paul’s band, too,” he told me back at the very first meeting. “So maybe that’s why people were surprised by the playing. It wasn’t meant to be like Led Zeppelin anymore than it was supposed to be like Free or Bad Company.”

Indeed. Now in 1988, he was about to release his first solo album, ‘Outrider’. On the strength of a weekly rock show I used to present on Sky TV which Jimmy, to my astonishment, claimed to be “a fan” of, I had been hired by his American record company, Geffen, to film and record a series of interviews with him for circulation, along with the new album, to a variety of different media outlets around the world. Jimmy didn’t want to do hundreds of different interviews, they explained. He just wanted to do one. With me.

Still gobsmacked, I turned up to see him that day not knowing what to expect. Would I find the fire-breathing rock devil of legend waiting there or… what? But as soon as he entered the room with a small, modest smile on his face, his right hand extended in greeting, I knew it was not going to be like that. Instead, I met a man anxious to put everyone at ease, aware no doubt of the effect his presence could have on certain, impressionable types like myself back then. Someone, above all, who wished to be treated as normally as possible.

He was going through one of his periodic clean-ups and as I sat in his studio drinking lager while we listened to the album at top volume, I noticed he was sipping from a bottle of alcohol-free beer. I wanted to ask him about it. But then there were so many things I wanted to ask him about, and in amongst all the predictable questions about the ‘Outrider’ album which we recorded over the subsequent weeks, I couldn’t help but stray ever deeper into Zeppelin territory whenever the chance arose.

Of the many things we discussed both on and off the record, one of the most memorable was the time he described the period immediately after Bonham’s death in 1980.

“I was shattered at the time,” he said quietly. “I lost a very, very close friend. There was a point after that where I hadn’t touched the guitar for ages and I just… it just related everything, you know, to what had happened, the tragedy that had happened.”

It had been a “long, dark period,” he said. The days passed slowly but the years flashed by like lightning.

“I called up my road manager one day and said, ‘Look, get the Les Paul out of storage’. But when he went to get it the case was empty! I think somebody took it out and borrowed it. They shouldn’t have and it eventually reappeared. But when he came back and said the guitar’s missing, I said ‘That’s it, forget it, I’m finished’. But it eventually turned up, and thank God, it did…”

Otherwise you wouldn’t be here today?

“That’s right,” he said matter-of-factly.

On anther occasion, I enquired whether there was a particular period in Zeppelin he looked back on as the high point?

“That’s a difficult question,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “I could go on for hours about the memories I have [of Zeppelin]. It was always exciting in one way or another. There was a high point virtually every six months. One of the most surprising times, actually, was when we went back to the States. It must have been about 1974, and we did two open-air festivals, one after another. These were the first two dates on the tour and there were, well, 50,000 people at each one. And that was just for the band on its own, because we didn’t have a support act. And we thought, hey, what’s going?”

That was when it hit you just how enormous the band had become?

“I guess, in a way, yes. I mean, I knew that we were pretty big, but I hadn’t imagined it to be on that sort of scale. In fact, even now, I still find it difficult to take it all in, just how much it all meant, you know?”

If John hadn’t died then, I asked, they would have carried on indefinitely?

“Oh, I sincerely hope so. I think so, yeah, from the sort of discussions we were having just prior to John’s death. We were going to the States on tour anyway. And then we would have been revitalised after getting back on the road, because that would have been the first really big tour we’d have had for quite a while. I’m sure that would have been enough stimulus to get us in the studio and probably doing… who knows what! Every album was so different from the previous one. That was one of the best things about the band — that it was always in state of change.”

How did he explain Zeppelin’s enduring appeal, though? The Puff Daddy and Black Crowes collaborations may still have been a decade away, but between Whitesnake, Kingdom Come, Def Leppard and the rest, by the end of the 80s Zeppelin’s influence could still be seen and heard everywhere.

“Well, I can’t explain it,” he shrugged. “Obviously, what we were doing, the energy we were putting out, touched a lot of people, and it’s wonderful to have been part of something like that. I guess it’s every musician’s dream to have been in a band like that. I’m just fortunate to have been there, and honoured to have been there.

“It’s quite interesting, really, all these bands that are now using it as a textbook. I mean, literally quoting from the textbook, as opposed to just reading a textbook and then reinterpreting. Well, I’m expected to go into a rage. But to tell you the truth, when I saw the Whitesnake video [for ‘In The Heat Of The Night’, Zep’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ writ MTV-large] and there’s a part where the [guitarist Adrian Vandenberg] starts playing with a bow, I actually fell around laughing. Literally! I was sitting on the bed watching it, and I promise you, I fell on the ground laughing. That’s how silly it can become…”

When I asked him whether he’d read any of the books that had then recently been published about Zeppelin, he was equally dismissive.

“I haven’t read them, to be honest with you,” he insisted. “And I’m being very honest with you. I was given Hammer Of The Gods and I read part of it. But then I threw it away, because I realised what it was going to be and I didn’t want to get bored…”

Was it really so far away from the truth then? The way he remembered it anyway?

“Well, now, that’s another point, I suppose. If you had John Paul Jones in here, and Robert, in separate rooms, but all miked up together, and somebody said, well what happened at such and such a point? There would probably be three different interpretations. But with these sort of books, they’ve just became rather… sensational.”

Would he ever consider putting his own side of it down for posterity though, in a book?

“I don’t know about that,” he chuckled. “It would probably get banned before it even got onto the shelves! No, that would be too controversial, wouldn’t it?”

Maybe in 50 years, then? “Yeah, put it in a time capsule. Then when everyone’s forgotten about Led Zeppelin bring it out.”

Forgotten about Led Zeppelin? We wouldn’t be reading that one for a while then.

But when, finally, I got round to asking, not for the last time as it would turn out, about the likelihood of he, Plant and Jones ever actually getting Zeppelin back together, even on a temporary basis, he was less forthcoming. Reading between the lines now, though, it’s pretty clear what — or rather who — the problem was. “Robert has got a solo career which is working very certainly, so who knows?” Jimmy had said, and that was that.

As the years passed and we met and talked again, the same old question would crop up and each time it would boil down to the same old thing. Interviewing Jimmy for Radio One backstage at Castle Donington in 1990, just before he went onstage to jam with Aerosmith, I asked him again: what about putting the band back together again, then?

“You’ll have to ask Robert,” he said as his entourage dissolved into fits of laughter. “It’s true though, isn’t it?” he insisted with a grin. “You now what I mean? I’d love to, I love playing that stuff. It’s a part of me, you know — a great big part of me, and I love playing it.”

We left it there. We always did.

Now, suddenly, in the year 2000, it’s no longer the last question on the list when interviewing Jimmy Page. It seems to have begun with his unexpected collaboration with Puff Daddy on their steaming version of ‘Kashmir’, and gained real momentum with his equally unexpected liaison with The Black Crowes, but right now Jimmy Page sound like he’s finally free of his past. Suddenly, it no longer seems to matter whether he gets Led Zeppelin back together or now.

“I’m so fortunate to have that sort of facility,” he says now. “It feels like there are so many avenues that I can trek.”

So what comes next? First, a proper tour with The Black Crowes; ostensibly of the US but with the prospect of further travels, he says, a distinct possibility.

“I was a Black Crowes fan before we started working together,” says Jimmy, his speech starting to speed up again. “For a long time before, actually. The first thing I heard by them was ‘Hard To Handle’ and I remember thinking, Jesus, that guy sings good! Then I must have heard another track because the next thing is I bought the album, it was their first. I don’t normally buy albums by new bands but I really thought they were kicking.

“What I’ve found out now is the band is still really kicking, but now it’s really good. When you listen to their most recent stuff you can hear a positive maturity coming through in their music. And they’re bloody good writers, too. So to actually play with them, a band as good as that, for me it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world. It was just ideal.”

“Because anyone can have a crack at a Zeppelin song — plenty do — but to actually do it properly, especially with someone who partially created those songs standing there, it can’t have been easy. But they did it, and with their own identity still intact, too. I mean, the way Chris sang them — amazing!”

“They’re such great guys. And that’s the other thing about it, everyone was having so much fun, we’d all like to do it again…”

There is only one problem, he says.

“The thing about touring America is that no matter how well you plan the days, after al while it does tend to become very Spïnal Tap. [But] all the lunacy and the laughs of touring are unavoidable. Once you get on the road, it’s hang onto your head time, really.”

Meanwhile, he is already thinking beyond the next Crowes tour.

“Actually, I have got one project in mind that I want to do, which I think is going to be incredible. It’s still early days and I really can’t tell you what it is exactly, but it’s the sort of thing people are gonna go, ‘Thank God, I’ve always wanted him to do that!’ I’ve already got material written that I had last year. I did one of the new numbers at Net Aid [at Wembley last year]. But by the time of my own set, everyone had probably turned back to Cooking With Delia or whatever…”

The track in question, ‘Domino’, he describes as “an instrumental in its earliest stages. I was pleased with it, but then I know what it’s going to be once I really get my claws into it. But I’ve got loads of things like that, really good ideas of what I wanna do. Great rhythmic things and…” He halts, aware that he is starting to talk about something he has promised himself he wouldn’t.

Finally then, at this stage of the game — Jimmy will be 56 this year — it’s clearly not about money anymore (he’s reputedly one of the wealthiest musicians in the world), and it’s plainly not about the fame either (he spends enough time scrupulously avoiding the spotlight). So, what is it about for Jimmy Page these days?

“No, it’s not about the money. It’s about the challenge of still being able to come up with something spontaneously. That moment of spontaneity that causes the creative spark, where you know you’ve got something really different going on. If I can still manage to pull that off, that’s what it’s about for me.”

“Because at the end of the day, it really is about the music. I was always very passionate about the music, because I’m a fan of it. And that’s really what I am. A fan…”

Subjects: Music 音楽

Tags: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, music