Indeed. A caravan of disciples from London was organized with the precision of an RAF offensive. A builder’s van was hired and a driver, Graham Ackers—the only boy with a driver’s license—recruited for the five-hour trip north. Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards were picked up at a square in London and, with four others, were jammed like sardines into the windowless capsule with nothing more than side benches for seats. Be that as it may, music made up for the pitiful accommodations. Graham Ackers had brought along tape copies of Swing Low, a new French release by the Staple Singers, whose last song on side 2 had the refrain “This may be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know.” Another passenger, named Mick Sales, was carrying the brand-new album Howlin’ Wolf, with a rocking chair on the cover, which became the main topic of conversation for a portion of the trip. (Later, when they managed to locate a record player, it was the first time any of the boys heard “Little Red Rooster.”) The only person absent from the delegation was nineteen-year-old Jimmy Page, an acolyte on the fringe of that circle, who had a gig that night playing with Neil Christian & the Crusaders and would take the train to Manchester, arriving late Sunday afternoon.

  It was a long, edgy drive up the provincial M1, the first time any of the van’s passengers had traveled on a motorway. Not all of the logistics had been carefully planned. There was nowhere to stay in Manchester when they arrived Saturday at dusk. The more fortunate crashed at a student flat, Brian Jones sought cover in the YMCA, while Mick and Keith, seriously broke, simply slept in the uninsulated van. Sunday morning was misty and cold. As the first show didn’t start until six o’clock, they had to kill most of the day, largely spent walking the streets of the city and lingering over a single dish in a Chinese restaurant. Their conversation, which stretched on for hours, was woefully single-minded.

  “Is Hooker going to sound like his record?”

  “Are they going to play our favorite songs?”

  Mick wondered if the harmonica would be amplified. “You think Shaky Jake Harris will blow directly into the mic?”

  Around five o’clock, weary and talked out, they hooked up with Jimmy Page under an arcade of the Free Trade Hall, an Italianate palazzo-style structure in the center of town. Introductions were made to Mick, Keith, and Brian, and a rapport was immediate and deep felt. Jimmy already had the goods. Only nineteen at the time, he’d earned a reputation as a crackerjack guitarist, having played at the Marquee with Blues Incorporated and been a member of two well-known cover bands, Red E. Lewis & the Red Caps and Neil Christian & the Crusaders. Mick, Keith, and Brian were keen to milk his exploits, even though he wasn’t part of their world. These were like-minded, kindred spirits, dedicated to music and a life that broke the bounds of convention.

  Jimmy wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with Brian Jones, whom he regarded as something of a blues prodigy. He’d already checked him out at the Ealing Club during one of Jones’s solo sets. “I was struggling with the Elmore James stuff,” Jimmy recalled. “Suddenly, it clicked. It was in the tuning. [Brian] was doing it.” He’d been looking forward to meeting Brian, though that wasn’t his primary objective. “I went because I really wanted to see John Lee Hooker.”

  The American blues artists were playing two concerts that night, and the boys had tickets for both—cheap seats in the rafters for the first show, but nearly ringside for the second. In between performances, they convened at the bar. Aside from Page, who enjoyed a full dance card of well-paying gigs, most could afford only a half of bitter. The conversation, on the other hand, was priceless.

  They marveled at the impressive Memphis Slim, but more for his natty appearance than his florid delivery. The man certainly knew how to wear a suit. He was lithe and loose-limbed, and he looked the epitome of chic with his high-gloss, brilliantined hair, sporting a white Pepé Le Pew streak in the center of his forehead. Slim had rocked Arkansas honky-tonks and dance halls with a set of jump-blues standouts that included “Every Day I Have the Blues,” “Steppin’ Out,” and “Rockin’ the Blues,” but he delivered them in a way that relied more on charm than on a conventional approach to the blues. Be that as it may, the young musicians watched spellbound during his set. They couldn’t take their eyes off Slim’s upright bass player, a man of prodigious proportions who stood over six foot six and handled the instrument as if it were a child’s toy: the legendary Willie Dixon.

  More than anyone, Dixon had shaped the sound of Chicago blues. One of Chess Records’ irreplaceable cornerstones, he’d arranged and produced the earliest recordings of Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and worked with Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley—the entire pantheon. Yet it was as a songwriter that Dixon left his indelible stamp. The Dixon songbook was the bible of the blues: “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Little Red Rooster,” “Spoonful,” “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover,” and—perhaps most impressive to the young Jimmy Page—“You Need Love,” whose lyric kicks off with “You’ve got yearnin’ and baby I got burnin’.”

  Dixon slapped that bass the way he might have manhandled one of the ring opponents he encountered on his way to the Illinois Golden Gloves Heavyweight Championship in 1937. He was the engine, the rudder, and the anchor behind Memphis Slim, and he backed the rest of the acts as each took its turn on the stage.

  Mick Jagger and Brian Jones were particularly fixated on Shaky Jake Harris, who “produced a harmonica and blew as hard as he could directly into the microphone.” This was the first time they’d ever seen this done. They had heard it was Little Walter’s technique, but seeing was believing, and they were thrilled by the explosive sound it produced. They made mental notes for their upcoming gigs. Shaky Jake would leave his imprint on the Stones, but the night’s coup de grace came at the hands of T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker.

  None of the boys had ever witnessed such flamboyant showmanship. Of course, they’d seen Chuck Berry duck-walking across the screen in Rock, Rock, Rock! and Jazz on a Summer’s Day, but it didn’t prepare them for the flash theatrics of T-Bone Walker. He roamed the stage like a gladiator, wielding his guitar as if it were a sword in a Roman coliseum. One observer recalled how “he dropped the guitar between his legs and then swung it up behind his head for a solo.” Other times, he lay prone on the lip of the proscenium, facing the audience, and fingered the frets almost by osmosis. In the same way Shaky Jake landed on the young Stones, Jimmy Page never forgot the swashbuckling Walker.

  John Lee Hooker, by comparison, was vegetative, the model of restraint—but just as impressive. His driving, boogie-style guitar was so idiosyncratic, mixing tempos and emphases as if they were cocktails, better shaken, not stirred. This was the real thing, the dark Delta blues that Jimmy Page had come to hear. “Boogie Chillun” and “I’m in the Mood” reverberated spiritually through the hall. Through Hooker’s abbreviated set, Dave Williams recalls glancing at the men sitting on either side of him—Jimmy Page to his left, Keith Richards to his right. “Their jaws were on their knees,” he says. “They were transfixed. They didn’t so much as breathe through his set.”

  After a rousing finale, the boys couldn’t contain themselves. They charged the stage while their blues heroes remained by the footlights, somewhat overwhelmed by the unexpected stampede. A squirrelly-faced Mick Jagger nervously thrust his program at his favorite performer—“Please, Mr. Hooker, can I have your autograph?”—as Hooker, looking shell-shocked by the attention, scrawled a signature across the cover. Meanwhile, Brian Jones collared Shaky Jake and cadged a trophy—the performer’s harmonica. At the other end of the receiving line, Jimmy Page and Keith Richards managed to shake hands with their idols, but they remained speechless, overawed.

  It wasn’t until they reassembled in the van for the trip home that the emotional lid came off. The boys were jubilant, ecstatic. The blues had come alive for them. For the past few months, they’d been playacting as blues artists, serving up what they thought the music should sound like. Now here it was, the genuine article, to savor and emulate. It was in their heads; they were drunk on it.

  It was late, inching on midnight, by the time the van pulled out of Manchester. After some debate, they’d voted on an all-night drive back to London. Mick was due in class at ten the next morning, Keith needed to report for his job delivering the mail, and Jimmy was booked into a full day of recording sessions that required his early attendance. There was just enough gas left to make the trip, but in fact they could have gotten there on adrenaline alone.

  “We were on a big high,” Dave Williams recalls. Brian Jones upped the energy by pulling out Shaky Jake’s harmonica and blowing a suggestive bluesy vamp. The entire van—even Jimmy Page, not the world’s greatest vocalist—burst into song.

  Bright lights, big city

  Gone to my baby’s head . . .

  For a hundred miles or so, they worked through a medley of Jimmy Reed songs, segueing into “Big Boss Man,” “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” and “Shame, Shame, Shame.” When they’d exhausted their voices, Brian, who was quite a good mimic, entertained the troops by doing spot-on impressions of their mentors, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, keeping the gang in stitches well into the dawn. His send-up of Davies’s shuck and jive was particularly savage. “When I’s sings a Jimmy Reed song, I’s tends to sound like Jimmy Reed,” he mugged, providing a mantra the gang recited upon greeting each other throughout the next year.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was official: Great Britain was infatuated with the blues. By the spring of 1963, the Rolling Stones (no longer merely Rollin’)—adding bass player Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart on piano, and drummer Charlie Watts—had harnessed the power of roots R&B. They’d plundered the grooves of Jimmy Reed at Carnegie Hall, Howlin’ Wolf’s “rocking chair” album, and every Chuck Berry record known to man, investing those songs with a rock ’n roll backbeat, basically reinventing the blues. With a sturdy set of hybrid songs, the Stones eventually gravitated to playing at a makeshift club behind the Station Hotel in Richmond. Not just a gig but a residency—and with fans. “It was a matter of atmosphere,” a local promoter reported. “They seemed in a world of their own as [the Stones] played music that electrified the whole place.”

  But it was Jimmy Page who was looking beyond the blues. By the summer of 1966, he was fronting the Yardbirds and putting the screws to the British electric blues idiom. The group’s blues would become more progressive, less structured, tougher, scrappier; their gigs more unpredictable. But Jimmy Page still wasn’t satisfied. The blues had laid the groundwork for a musical upheaval that would draw on innovation, technology, and volume, incredible volume. Page had a clear-eyed idea about the blues; to him, it functioned as a springboard to something bigger and more dynamic. And he knew exactly where he was taking it.

  [2]

  Jimmy Page’s blues didn’t lay claim to either a Mississippi or a Chicago heritage. They originated deep in the Surrey Delta, a place not found on the coordinates of any map.

  It seemed inconceivable that the trinity of British guitar gods—Page, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton—all hailed from a lush, wooded region in the southeast of England known more for millionaires than for the blues. The county, located on tributaries of the Thames, was part of the booming commuter belt of London. Jimmy’s parents—James, a personnel manager in a plastic-coating factory, and Patricia, a dental nurse—moved there, to Epsom, in 1952, when their only child was eight years old.

  Epsom was an old market town, with a classic central square flanked by distinctive Georgian-era features: a bank, a church, a town hall. Its best-known site was a redbrick clock tower, rising to seventy feet, which dominated the skyline and served as a hangout for local teenagers who lacked a more suitable place to meet. Throughout its early life, Epsom was rustic and sleepy. Nestled in the lap of unspoiled hills and plains, one could mistake it for Ewell, Guilford, Ashtead, Horsham, or any of the villages clustered nearby. But Epsom got a wake-up call in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when a rich vein of mineral springs transformed the tranquil town into a de rigueur health resort, attracting the upper crusty to its healing waters. The production of Epsom salts—lavish deposits of magnesium sulfate extracted from the waters—furthered the town’s reputation as a tony spa, buttressed by five psychiatric hospitals built at the turn of the century. And twice a year, its population more than doubled to fifty thousand for the running of two classic English horse races on Epsom Downs.

  The Pages occupied a standard semidetached “two-up, two-down” on Miles Road, a crescent of identical quotidian houses customary to postwar England. These were humble abodes, often lacking indoor toilets, and many, like Jimmy’s, backed onto the railroad line to London. Epsom had its share of manors and estates, but Miles Road fell squarely on the wrong side of the tracks. “It was a nondescript street,” recalls one of the Pages’ neighbors. “There were hardly any cars, because no one could afford to have one, and nothing in the front yards to distinguish any house from the other.” However, the back gardens, usually twice the depth of the houses, were precious tracts in those austere years, with almost every square foot devoted to growing vegetables.

  Fortunately, there was no scarcity of playmates. The wartime baby boom had visited almost every house on Miles Road. On any given day, Jimmy could kick a tennis ball around the street or go rollerskating with his next-door neighbor, Jeff Reese, or with David Housego or Pete Neal or Dave Williams, all of whom lived on the block. A lot of the neighborhood boys Jimmy’s age were sons of American servicemen stationed in England, so at school they often played baseball instead of cricket.

  The Americans also imported their incomparable music. They owned records—mostly country and western and rockabilly, in addition to a smattering of Chess, Checker, Sun, and esoteric label issues that straddled the breach between rhythm and blues and nascent rock ’n roll. Given that the Americans picked up and moved often, many of those records wound up in secondhand shops, mixed in with jukebox discards—and into the hands of British kids who retrieved them. Jimmy’s mate Dave Williams actively salvaged these rejects by sorting through endless dusty bins, selecting any records with singers whose names sounded interesting—American. Among them were the long-forgotten pioneers of recording history, like Texas Tyler, Jackie Lee Cochran, Wade Hall, Jessie Hill, and Ronnie Self. “So many were complete and utter junk,” Williams recalls, “but every now and then I’d come up with a Johnny Burnette Trio or a Carl Perkins and rush right over to Jimmy’s to share my discovery.”

  Jimmy found the music irresistible. “He liked to listen to records on the radio,” his mother recalled. The Pages, like most British families, had a boxy mahogany radiogram in the front room of the house, and Jimmy worked its Bakelite dials with a safecracker’s expertise. Radio Luxembourg, the airwaves’ only link to rock ’n roll in the UK, could be tuned in when the heavens cooperated. Its staticky reception, sounding like it was filtered through a wind tunnel, hinted at the revolution brewing on the horizon. “You had to stick by the radio and listen to overseas radio to even hear good rock records,” Jimmy recalled. He never missed a broadcast. On a clear night, with his ear pressed to the speaker, he might pick up fragments of Fats Domino or Buddy Holly or LaVern Baker or the Everly Brothers or Elvis. He also stumbled across disc jockey Alan Freed’s fifteen-minute segment on American Forces Network—a potpourri of R&B, rockabilly, pop, and the hard stuff attributed to bad boys like Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran.

  Up until the age of twelve, Jimmy’s hands-on musical experience was limited to singing in the choir at St. Barnabas Anglican Church. “He’d have a go on anybody’s piano when we went visiting,” his mother reminisced. Otherwise, the Pages were indifferent when it came to musical instruments. Of course, there was that cheap Spanish-style guitar that had come with the house. It was nothing more than a neglected ornament in a corner of the living room that no one had bothered to stash in the attic. But . . . a guitar, no less . . . with steel strings . . . ready to play . . . almost. Finding it, Jimmy said, felt “like divine intervention.” His curiosity about it coincided with two songs he’d heard on the radio. The first was Elvis Presley’s rockabilly masterpiece “Baby, Let’s Play House.” From its uninhibited, stuttery opening—“Whoa, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby / Baby, baby, baby, b-b-b-b-b-b-baby, baby, baby”—Jimmy was hooked. “I heard the acoustic guitar, slap bass, and electric guitar—three instruments and a voice—and they generated so much energy I had to be part of it,” he said. It was impossible to ignore. “I wanted to play it. I wanted to know what it was all about.”

  Almost as alluring, but in an entirely different vein, was “Rock Island Line,” Lonnie Donegan’s overheated slaughter of the Leadbelly classic, which touched off a mid-1950s musical craze among British teenagers. Called skiffle, after African American slang to describe music provided at rent parties, it mashed up American folk and blues standards in the cornball style of old-timey jug bands. Basically, skiffle enabled working-class kids to assemble backyard combos using conventional homemade instruments—a laundry washboard doubled for percussion, a rope attached to an old tea chest for bass, a comb and tissue paper sandwiched for woodwinds, all anchored by a ukulele or guitar. Calling skiffle a craze was something of an understatement. Between thirty thousand and fifty thousand skiffle groups got a jump start in Britain, one of them at the hands of twelve-year-old Jimmy Page.

  That old Spanish guitar prop came in handy. He convinced an older schoolmate, Rod Wyatt, to help tune the sorry instrument and even show him how to strum a few basic chords. Wyatt could even bash out a version of “Rock Island Line,” which impressed Jimmy to no end. It more or less chained him to the guitar until he mastered the damn song. “From the beginning, Jimmy and the guitar were joined at the hip,” says Dave Williams, who stopped by regularly to check on his friend’s progress. “Once he had those chords down, he basically taught himself how to play.”