Marriott was intrigued, if for no other reason than he’d earn some decent money for a change. But word of the approach got back to Arden, and a message was sent: “How would you like to play guitar with broken fingers? You will, if you don’t stay away from Stevie.”

  Arden’s point struck a chord. “We just said, ‘Let’s forget about the whole thing, quick,’ ” Jimmy recalled.

  Nevertheless, the idea lingered. Every once in a while, the musicians revisited their dream of forming a supergroup like Cream. It held such promise. The chaos factor tickled Keith Moon’s sense of devilry. “It’d go down like a lead zeppelin,” he snickered.

  Lead zeppelin. Jimmy Page loved the irreverent image. Lead zeppelin. He held onto the thought.

  Chapter Four

  FRONT

  [1]

  The only band going down like a lead zeppelin was the Yardbirds.

  Simon Napier-Bell may not have been their ideal manager, but his instincts were spot-on. Two “genius guitarists,” as he referred to them, augured trouble.

  Jeff Beck had always envisioned sharing the spotlight with Jimmy Page. “He’d come in on bass,” Chris Dreja recalled, “but that was obviously a waste of talent, so I switched to bass and they did dual lead stuff.” That had been the goal from the jump. “Jeff was going to be the primary lead guitarist, but we could see the possibility of playing riffs in harmony,” Jimmy allowed. “It was a concept no one else was doing.”

  Chris Dreja had no complaints. He knew he wasn’t any kind of flash guitarist. Meanwhile, making space for Jimmy Page fostered its own rewards. “Jimmy had come from a studio set-up where you’re punctual and professional,” Dreja said, “and he brought all that with him into the band.” As soon as Chris felt comfortable with the bass, he’d gladly step aside to let Jimmy take over on guitar.

  A couple months, they figured, would do the trick, but with Jeff Beck in the mix, their good plans met with untimely consequences.

  On August 5, 1966, just a week after Cream played its debut performance, the Yardbirds kicked off a two-month tour of the States to promote their hit single “Over Under Sideways Down.” Jeff Beck had contracted a case of tonsillitis, which put him in a surly mood. After the band made its way through the Midwest into Texas, his petulance became more volatile, destructive. At a small club in New Mexico, things turned lethal. It was a hot night, the temperature up into the triple digits, and Beck’s boiling point already dangerously in the red. “Something went wrong during the set, so Jeff just kicked over a stack of amps, and they smashed out through the window,” Jim McCarty recalled. The fates were on Beck’s side this time. He breathed a sigh of relief at a narrow escape. “The power amp had a fixed cannon socket, so [the cord] wouldn’t pull out,” he said, “and it was only that which prevented it from hitting a passer-by underneath.”

  The amps on the tour were invariably crappy, but they weren’t the only bane of the Yardbirds’ existence. There were girls who lusted after the band and ignited a kind of jealousy that could be dangerous. Their “redneck, shit-kicking” boyfriends threatened violence at every show. “There was a macho contingent in the audience who wanted to kill you straightaway,” Beck said. “We never knew if we were going to get home alive.”

  By the time the Yardbirds rolled into San Francisco, Beck had had enough. For their date at the Carousel Ballroom on August 25, Jeff simply didn’t show—later, he claimed to have been too ill—forcing Jimmy and Chris Dreja to switch instruments a month early. “It was really nerve-racking,” Jimmy recalled, “because this was at the height of the Yardbirds’ concert reputation, and I wasn’t exactly ready to roar off on lead guitar.” But it was inevitable—and permanent. “So when Jeff recovered, it was two lead guitars from that point on.”

  Two lead guitars. The effect was enormous, sensational, like hearing Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin perform a duet on Bach’s Partita no. 2 in D Minor. “It’d take your breath away when they played together,” said Henry Smith, who served as roadie for the Yardbirds. “Their styles were different but complementary, and the electricity it generated was fantastic.”

  The payoff was no accident. “We had talked about playing harmony lines and arranging parts that would be the rock equivalent of a brass or saxophone section from the big-band era,” Jimmy said. They’d actually practiced together, playing dual leads but with a free-form feel. “We learned a couple of Freddie King solos note by note, and when we play them in unison it sounds good.”

  They were exploring new territory. “We rehearsed hard on all sorts of things,” Jimmy recalled, “especially introduction riffs to things like ‘Over Under Sideways Down,’ which we were doing in harmonies. It was the sort of thing that people like Wishbone Ash and Quiver would perfect, that dual lead guitar idea.”

  Once they took it onstage, the stereo solos became extravaganzas. They were on a frequency that didn’t register on normal channels. “There were fucking brainstorms every night!” Beck exclaimed. Jimmy and Jeff pushed each other to innovate, to play harder, to go somewhere they’d never been before. To the untrained ear, it sounded improvisational, impulsive, rash—solos took off and soared into the unknown, fishtailing, whipping about like daredevil stunt pilots, as though they’d never find their way home, then suddenly intertwining somewhere in the subtonic universe, where everything existed in perfect harmony. It was a feat of showmanship but evolved into an artistic smackdown. The solos were dares, Jimmy and Jeff staring each other down. Go ahead. Let’s see what you can do. Chris Dreja, whose thankless job it was to maintain a steady bass line throughout these sorties, characterized the guitarists as “a couple of gunslingers.” Jim McCarty, who observed the action from atop his drum kit, said, “It was fascinating to watch, but it was also unhealthy.” It was almost as if they were dueling it out. And then it got personal.

  “I personally don’t think Jimmy ever went out on stage with the intention of trying to blow Jeff off the stage,” Dreja said. “But with Jeff, I think, it got to be a ‘my-balls-are-bigger-than-yours’ sort of thing. . . . He was so much more temperamental than Jimmy.”

  “On stage,” he said, “Jeff was just uncontrollable.” There was no rhyme or reason to it. Jimmy added, “Beck would often go off into something else.”

  Part of the problem was their different styles. Jimmy was a session veteran, where arrangements were polished, tight, and controlled. There was a lot of discipline involved in the way he played guitar, while Jeff played off the top of his head. He was intuitive, perhaps even more inventive than Jimmy, and, as a result, unpredictable. You never knew where he was going to wind up.

  As time wore on, there would be a lot of posturing, a lot of one-upmanship. “If Jimmy played something incredible, a look would cross Jeff’s face—not exactly a look of appreciation, almost as if he’d been made to look bad—and you could tell he was going to take it to him, to outdo Jimmy any way he could.” Jeff wasn’t oblivious to the friction. “In the end,” he said, “we were just on opposite sides of the stage, glaring at each other and blowing all night.”

  It should have been exhilarating for the guitarists, but the competition created too much tension. “Every night,” as Jim McCarty pointed out, it was “a battle royale.” Jimmy enjoyed playing with and against Jeff, but the vibe made it feel as though he was under constant attack. “[It was] like a kettle boiling with a cork stuck in it,” he said.

  The pressure mounted through two successive tours, one with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue and another with the Stones in September 1966. Some nights were magical, with the guitarists staging a dazzling feat of craft, but more often than not Jeff’s ego intruded. In his ongoing quest to outdo Jimmy, he often wound up outdoing himself. Norrie Drummond, reviewing one of the Yardbirds’ shows for NME, called out Jeff in particular, saying if he “cut out the gymnastics with his guitar, the group might find some semblance of music.”

  Something had to give.

  For better or worse, Simon Napier-Bell booked the Yardbirds on Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tour, beginning on October 20, 1966. Clark, the genial host of TV’s American Bandstand with several hands in related record and concert businesses, was a notorious slave driver when it came to his road shows. He’d package half a dozen acts with records on the charts and tour them through every godforsaken town in America with little regard for comfort or joy—in this case, thirty-three shows in twenty-seven days across sixteen states on a dilapidated, overcrowded Greyhound bus. The routine drove Jeff nuts. “All the American groups on the bus played their guitars non-stop and were always singing,” he grumbled. The bill was a mishmash of incompatible attractions: the Yardbirds, Brian Hyland, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Distant Cousins, and Bobby Hebb. Often they played two gigs a day in locales that were several hundred miles apart, so that by the time the second show was over, most of the performers were exhausted and on the verge of collapse. Jimmy Page hated the whole operation. “You had to sleep in the luggage racks or the bus seats,” he said. “It’s just ludicrous to remember how bad it was.”

  In the Deep South, where the tour began, the audiences were unruly. “People just shouted out all kinds of shit. ‘Y’all turn that guitar down!’—and worse,” Jim McCarty recalls. “Jeff was unhappy straightaway.” The equipment was awful. If he didn’t like the way things sounded, he was liable to grab his amp and bolt offstage. He hated the whole setup. It made him “hyper, nervous, insecure.” As a result, his playing was erratic: brilliant or inept, a toss-up depending on the gig. “You wake up in the middle of the night, and everything becomes a horror movie very, very quickly,” he said. “I wanted to go straight home.” He took out his frustration on a succession of amps. On October 29, at the end of his rope, he came offstage at the conclusion of the gig and smashed his beloved Les Paul guitar into a table. “He’d gone fucking crazy!” Jimmy said.

  They were back in Texas midway through the tour, and Jeff decided he’d had enough. He had a girlfriend waiting for him in Los Angeles, a bed and destination more appealing than another night on the tour. “Six hours in that thing was enough for me,” he said. The band was holed up at the Harlingen airport, waiting to fly halfway across the country, while their road manager was sorting out luggage and ticket itinerary. “I was on this escalator going up to the departure lounge,” Jeff recalled. “He was coming down, and called out, ‘Hey Jeff, where’re you goin’?’ ” Beck replied he was headed to a shop to buy a magazine and chewing gum. Instead, he got on a plane to LA. “Dumping Jimmy with all the guitar work in mid-tour was a pretty shitty trick,” he admitted, “but there was no other way out.”

  The Yardbirds continued the tour as a four-piece band, and Jimmy Page stepped up superbly. There were nights he seemed to summon Jeff Beck’s ghost, playing both leads at once, or at least that was the way he made it sound. Other nights, his solos were so economical they created high drama in what they held back. Either way, the crowds approved wholeheartedly, and he got a taste of what it felt like to command the spotlight in a top-rank band.

  “The Yardbirds weren’t the biggest thing in America,” Robert Plant noted later, “but they were the innovators almost of something that smelled refreshing to the American public.”

  When the Yardbirds reconvened in LA, where Jeff was billeted with his girlfriend, a powwow was arranged to discuss the band’s future. One thing was clear: they neither needed nor wanted to work with Jeff Beck anymore. “They were just totally adamant,” Jimmy recalled. Enough was enough. “And when it was over, Beck got up to leave and asked me if I was coming too. I said, ‘No, I’m going to stay behind.’ ”

  Jeff never saw that coming. He and Jimmy were mates; they were on the same flight path, the same frequency. The ensuing developments hit Jeff hard. He’d been sacked by his band and deserted by his mate. It finally dawned on him: “I’d burned all my bridges.”

  [2]

  The Yardbirds also carried on without Simon Napier-Bell. He’d become disinterested in managing the band, and there was no love lost between Jimmy and him. Simon found the guitarist “very difficult to deal with, always narky,” a badge that Jimmy wore with pride. More than once he’d served as spokesman for the band, confronting Napier-Bell on the dodgy bookkeeping that left the Yardbirds earning little more than a couple hundred pounds each after their various tours. The whole financial deal didn’t add up. He considered Napier-Bell nothing more than “an opportunist” who knew nothing about rock ’n roll, and he was happy to be rid of him.

  Though not entirely rid of him. According to Jimmy, “Napier-Bell called up with the news that he was selling his stake in the band to Mickie Most.” It was introduced as an unusual comanagement situation. Napier-Bell would operate mostly in the shadows, concentrating on Jeff Beck’s solo career, while someone from Most’s company, RAK Management, would tend to the Yardbirds. “It was really weird,” Jim McCarty recalls. “We went to Most’s office in Oxford Street not knowing what to expect, and this enormous guy we’d never seen before told us, ‘I’m taking over for Simon.’ ” The enormous guy’s name was Peter Grant.

  In truth, Jimmy was already friendly with Peter Grant. “I’d known Peter from way back in the days of Immediate [Records], because our offices were next door to Mickie, and Peter was working for him.”

  No matter where you were, you couldn’t miss Peter Grant. He was larger than life, a Buddha-like figure—six feet, three inches; 250 to 350 pounds, depending on the month—with an outsize personality to match. He commanded attention in any setting, not only by his girth but also by his swagger—he called it front—a posture laced with attitude and intimidation that he’d developed over years of working alongside toughs and villains.

  Grant’s backstory had a gritty, Dickensian flavor. He grew up the illegitimate, fatherless son of a secretary on the mean streets of Battersea, where survival depended on one’s ability to defend one’s space. He spent his adolescence shuttling in and out of orphanages and boarding schools while his mother struggled mightily to make ends meet. It was at one such residence, Northbrook House, that he first crossed paths with upper-class students, an alien species. The impetus was strong to even the playing field. “There used to be great battles,” he boasted, “and we beat them up.” Might was the way Grant expressed himself best. He could dominate others with a ferocious stare. Front! Sometimes that was all it took, but if violence was required to neutralize a situation, that was also within his power.

  In Peter Grant’s world, muscle served more use than formal education. Unable to pass Britain’s eleven-plus exam, in 1948 he entered Ingram County Secondary School for Boys in Thornton Heath, a seedy district of South London. “Ingram Road, as it was called, was the school for thugs, as opposed to gentlemen,” recalls Phil Carson, a student at rival, gentlemanly St. Joseph’s, who would become senior vice president of Atlantic Records and Grant’s colleague during Atlantic’s Led Zeppelin years. “That’s one of the early places Peter sharpened his tough-guy image.”

  But image didn’t yield much return in a gloomy technical school. On April 4, 1950, the day before his fifteenth birthday, Grant abandoned school to make his own way in the world. He burned through a series of odd jobs—working the line in a steel-barrel factory, waiting tables, apprenticing with a chef, and delivering messages for Reuters news agency. While working in a hotel kitchen, he was called up for national service, a compulsory two-year stretch, and assigned to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Northamptonshire, where he employed his culinary expertise in the company mess hall.

  The drift into show business was a bumpy ride. “I was fascinated by the theater,” Grant declared in an interview for an unreleased documentary. “It seemed pretty glamorous” to a onetime street kid who got his first taste of vaudeville at age thirteen working part time backstage at the Croydon Empire, sweeping up and ogling the chorus girls. In 1957, newly discharged from the army, he took a job that combined muscle and entertainment at a coffee bar in London.

  The 2i’s was no mere espresso and latte coffee bar. It served as the launchpad for skiffle and British rock ’n roll, the place where Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard got their starts, and, as such, attained a status that attracted starstruck crowds. To hold them at bay, Peter Grant was posted ominously at the door. He performed the same function, as bouncer, at Murray’s Cabaret Club and the Flamingo in Soho, mixing with performers as well as villains like the Kray brothers, whose tentacles stretched into talent management and protection.

  While working at the 2i’s, Grant forged a friendship with another young guy on the make who operated the coffee bar’s espresso and Coke machines and sang whenever the opportunity arose. Michael Hayes, like Peter, was “besotted with show business,” and especially James Dean, whom he studied and emulated. Hayes played guitar—though not very well; sang—though not very well; and studied the 2i’s performers, hoping to fabricate a workable stage persona. Inadvertently, he stumbled on a winner. He’d been watching American beach-blanket movies and picked up on a new, hip expression: “Oh, baby, you’re the most.” A colleague at the 2i’s recalled, “Every new record he heard was ‘the most,’ every new girl he met was ‘the most.’ ” The Corvette Sting Ray with dual exhausts, not just a hot rod but—the most. It struck a chord, and Michael Hayes became Mickie Most. Within weeks, he and a friend, Alex Wharton, formed a singing duo, the Most Brothers, and took their routine on a tour of drinking clubs in the provinces.

  “We were kind of like the English Everly Brothers,” Most said, “without the harmony or the musical ability.”

  It was tough to make ends meet for a bouncer and a glorified lounge act. Peter Grant and Mickie Most scrambled to pay the bills, moonlighting in a low-rent form of show business: the wrestling world. Grant worked as a timekeeper at bouts, eventually graduating to an audience shill at the Streatham Regal where he pretended to volunteer to lay his bulk on a plank of wood attached to a rope so that a wrestler—a buff Hungarian dwarf—could pull it with his teeth. One day, when the wrestler failed to appear, Grant took his place, with Mickie Most acting as his cornerman.