Jimmy Page (born 9 January 1944) is an English musician, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer who achieved international success as the guitarist and leader of the rock band Led Zeppelin. Page began his career as a studio session musician in London; and, by the mid-1960s, he had become the most sought-after session guitarist in England. He was a member of the Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968. Page is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential guitarists of all time. Rolling Stone magazine has described Page as “the pontiff of power riffing” and ranked him number 3 in their list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. (More from Wikipedia)
At one point, Jimmy Page starts flipping through a pile of 45’s and pulls out “Rumble” by Link Wray and His Ray Men. To see a rock legend grooving along with that song, to see that big beaming smile on his face, to hear him discussing how the song developed, to see Page actually doing “air guitar” to “Rumble”: that really is something special. The clip from It Might Get Loud is well worth a viewing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLEUSn8y9TI .
(February 2013)
The Yardbirds was one of my very favorite British Invasion bands. Casual rock music fans might know the band as successively including within its ranks three of the greatest rock guitarists of all time: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. That is, after Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds, he suggested Jimmy Page as his replacement; but Page was highly successful as a session guitarist in this period and instead recommended Jeff Beck, who played his first gig with the band just two days after Clapton left. Jimmy Page later joined the Yardbirds after Jeff Beck moved on.
(May 2014)
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Anyway, for their part, the members of Led Zeppelin say that the song doesn’t have a special meaning at all. Jimmy Page was quoted in Wikipedia as saying of the song: “The wonderful thing about ‘Stairway [to Heaven]’ is the fact that just about everybody has got their own individual interpretation to it, and actually what it meant to them at their point of life. And that’s what’s so great about it. Over the passage of years people come to me with all manner of stories about what it meant to them at certain points of their lives. About how it’s got them through some really tragic circumstances. . . . Because it’s an extremely positive song, it’s such a positive energy, and, you know, people have got married to [the song].”
(November 2014)
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Mike Stax’s return to San Diego in May 1982 triggered the exit of the original Crawdaddys bassist Mark Zadarnowski. This time, Stax came to town with an agenda; Stax is quoted by Ray Brandes: “I returned with lots of tapes of obscure ’60s beat, R&B and garage stuff, and we began to learn a lot of new covers, stuff like ‘Chicago’ by the Phantom Brothers, ‘She Just Satisfies’ by Jimmy Page [which I had figured inspired the band’s original “I’m Dissatisfied”], the Boots’ version of ‘Jump Back [Baby]’ and the Sorrows’ ‘You Got What I Want’. The rest of the band was finally open to doing stuff like this, which I’d been advocating all along, rather than being a purist R&B/blues band who only did songs by the original black artists.”
Another outstanding song on the Crawdaddys CD Here ’Tis is “Ruler of My Heart”, with the songwriting credited to Naomi Neville (the mother of Allen Toussaint; he often uses her name in his writing credits) and made famous by Irma Thomas. Then there is the Jimmy Page song mentioned earlier, “She Just Satisfies”.
(January 2015/2)
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Wikipedia states: “The band [Eleven] cites their major influences as Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin, Queen, The Beatles, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Sergei Prokofiev. With Chris Cornell [of Soundgarden and Audioslave], they recorded [Natasha] Shneider’s arrangement of Franz Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’, which appears on the album, A Very Special Christmas 3 [1997], in the liner notes of which they state they deliberately chose a classical work to help interest young people in classical music.”
(April 2015/1)
Like the band’s first record, the Primitives’ second single for Pye Records, “You Said” b/w “How Do You Feel” did not chart at all in the U.K. About the flip side, Bruce Eder notes: “[A] bluesy cut with a nice, choppy rhythm part, similar to what the Yardbirds did with ‘Here ’Tis’ or ‘Good Morning Little School Girl’ on-stage, only with better singing.”
Years later, word got out that, on both of the songs on this 45, the band’s lead guitarist Geoff Eaton was replaced with future Led Zeppelin star Jimmy Page, who was a prolific session guitarist in the early part of his career. As reported on popsike.com, the single has sold on eBay several times recently – for the equivalent of nearly $600 in one case – but oddly, this fact is not mentioned on any of the several items that I looked up on the website about this single.
“You Said” is included in the four-CD box set, Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969.
(May 2015)
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