Jimmy promptly got his hands on a copy of Play in a Day by Bert Weedon. It was the bible for future British rock virtuosos like George Harrison, Dave Davies, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, and Eric Clapton. But playing in a day was an eternity for Jimmy Page. “I was far too impatient,” he admitted. Besides, the tutorials were overly simplistic. They didn’t match the intricate fingering he heard on records. It was easier for him to play by ear. “You listened to the solo, lifted the tone arm, and put it back down to hear it again.” That way, he managed to work out arrangements on his own.

  Trouble was, his guitar wasn’t cutting it. It was no more than a toy. The strings hovered several inches above the frets and had no give, no resonance. He’d advanced beyond that guitar almost from the moment he picked it up. What he wanted—what he dreamed about— “was something you would see on albums by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and Buddy Holly,” he said. “Getting a guitar [like that] was like dreaming about a Cadillac.” A more respectable guitar, was, for a working-class family, an expensive proposition. His dad wasn’t unsympathetic, but there were terms to be met. “Okay,” he said, “but you have to do a paper round.” Obediently, Jimmy took over the Sunday delivery route in Epsom, going house to house and shouldering a satchel of newspapers filled with weekend supplements that weighed a ton.

  “I did a paper round and got a Hofner Senator,” he recalled, which was a step up but still no solution. The Senator was a sturdy, maple laminate f-hole guitar that tended to vibrate when strummed with any force. Jimmy just couldn’t get a decent sound out of it. “After increasing the paper round, I got an electric pick-up for it,” he said. But—how to amplify it? Lo and behold, his parents’ radiogram had an input on the back panel. “When the sound came through the speakers, I couldn’t believe it.” It didn’t exactly provide Mach 1 thrust, but it served Jimmy’s purpose for the time being. What he really needed, however, was an electric guitar.

  In the meantime, the Senator gave him enough firepower to cobble together a band. Dave Housego, Jimmy’s mate down the street, was recruited for the eponymous James Page Skiffle Group. Housego’s father had been a drummer in a wartime dance band and had a kit that he’d handed down to his son. The snare, played with brushes, provided a suitable shuffle accompaniment. From school, Jimmy dredged up a bass fiddle sideman and another guitar player to handle the singing chores. Even at the outset Jimmy knew his limitations. He had no confidence in his voice; the sound he made was nasal and thin. Playing the guitar was enough of a challenge. He decided to leave the singing to others.

  But the musical experience was key. “I could get together with my mates,” he noted, “and before you knew it, you had the serious spirit of music there.” The boys rehearsed in the front room of Jimmy’s house, working out arrangements to a universal skiffle set. Once you conquered “Rock Island Line,” you were only a hair’s breadth away from “John Henry,” “Cumberland Gap,” “Midnight Special,” and a half dozen others. It came together rather quickly. Jimmy’s mum was so impressed that, in the spring of 1958 she contacted the producers of the BBC-TV children’s staple All Your Own, a half-hour show that featured kids demonstrating their talent or discussing their hobbies. As it turned out, they booked the James Page Skiffle Group for an appearance on the Sunday-afternoon broadcast.

  In the brief clip that exists of the performance, a well-scrubbed Jimmy Page, decked out in a tidy crewneck sweater, his hair neatly combed in a mock pompadour, leads a quartet capably through a rousing “Mama Don’t Allow No Skiffle Round Here” and “Pick a Bale of Cotton.” In between the songs, Jimmy endures his first interview, an inane on-camera exchange with the show’s host, Huw Wheldon. Do they discuss the music that has just been played? Not a chance. The thirteen-year-old guitarist is interrogated about his career path. Would it be skiffle?

  “No,” Jimmy deadpans, “I want to do biological research.”

  A-ha-ha-ha—the host is amused and asks him to be specific. “Cancer, if it isn’t discovered by then,” Jimmy offers. So you’ll be studying germs, Wheldon replies, suggesting the limits of his knowledge of the subject. A “quite nervous” Jimmy later admitted that “whatever I said then was probably what I was studying that week.”

  The James Page Skiffle Group turned out to be a short-lived act. Skiffle provided a platform for playing music, but it was a passing phase. “There was some blues in skiffle music,” Jimmy conceded. “You got the songs, but the attitude and playing were not there yet.”

  The attitude was in rock ’n roll.

  Rock ’n roll wasn’t an unknown quantity to Jimmy. He was onto it well before skiffle. In early 1956, Dave Williams had come across the road to tell him about a record he’d heard on an American Forces Network broadcast from Germany—“Too Much Monkey Business” by Chuck “Crazy Legs” Perry. It wasn’t long before they turned up a ten-inch Chuck Berry EP with “Maybelline,” “Thirty Days (to Come Back Home),” “Wee Wee Hours,” and “Together (We Will Always Be)” on it. The discovery was like unearthing the Rosetta Stone. What the hell was he singing about? the boys wondered. The language was completely alien to them. Eventually it dawned on them: this is all about sex!

  In no time, they got wind of a cinema in Stoneleigh, the next village over from Epsom, that was playing one of the earliest jukebox musicals, Rock, Rock, Rock! “It was a crappy film,” Dave Williams recalls, “until Chuck Berry and the Johnny Burnette Trio came on—and then it was open mouth time.” Burnette and his band motored through “Lonesome Train,” which impressed with its riotous energy. Berry’s version of “You Can’t Catch Me” was a visual tour de force. When he entered the action, duck-walking his guitar across the frame and staring into the camera with a menacing grin, the boys almost came out of their seats. They went back the next day just to see that performance again. Not long afterward, they caught a showing of The Girl Can’t Help It, another shoddy B movie that was nothing but a pretense for the music. But the music . . . If Chuck Berry had whetted their appetites, then Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, and Eddie Cochran provided a three-star dessert. “ ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ did a number on our heads,” Williams confesses. “The other kids in the theater had no interest in the music. They went to see Jayne Mansfield’s tits. But Jimmy and I left there wanting to be Eddie Cochran, and we saw that movie over and over again.”

  Jimmy got a jump on the image makeover. For all intents and purposes, he was a sober kid with a plain-vanilla face, come-hither eyes, and sensuous lips. Once the guitar found a way into his hands, he set about constructing the rest of the package. The black leather trousers, the voluminous pink shirt, and the silver lamé waistcoat were beyond his reach. So was Cochran’s Cadillac-size orange Gretsch Signature guitar (at least, for the time being). But Jimmy could suss out how the songs were played. And he could strike the requisite pose. The attitude came naturally.

  But it was style and substance more than attitude that captured his imagination. The more Jimmy listened to rock ’n roll, the more he realized that hitmakers like Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley, Dale Hawkins, and Bill Haley were front men, recording artists, not necessarily the engines that drove their songs. The sound Jimmy fell in love with, the real drama on their records, was generated by a corps of unsung guitarists, players who could coax the slinkiest, most seductive sound out of six strings without drawing attention. Names started emerging from the shadows, names that weren’t printed on record labels or exalted by disc jockeys—James Burton, Cliff Gallup, Scotty Moore, Joe Maphis, Hubert Sumlin, Johnny Weeks, Matt Murphy. The licks they played lit a fire deep inside Jimmy’s imagination. He listened hard, studied them, copied their touch, their expression, teaching himself their techniques as one might a new language.

  “Solos which affected me could send a shiver up my spine,” he said, “and I’d spend hours, and in some cases days, trying to get them [down]. The first ones were Buddy Holly chord solos, like ‘Peggy Sue,’ but the next step was definitely James Burton on Ricky Nelson records, which was when it started to get difficult.”

  “Jimmy was obsessed with James Burton,” Dave Williams recalls. “I’d bought these junky Ricky Nelson LPs in secondhand record shops, and I took them around to Jim’s. A week later, parts of tracks were scratched away where he’d been playing and replaying the bloody solos. He worked his nuts off mastering them.”

  Deciphering solos was like solving brainteasers. Jimmy would attempt to solve them like the Allied code breakers at Bletchley Park. “The only way to do that was by listening to the record and moving the needle back to where the solo started again,” he explained. “Back and forth you’d go, so it would damage the record itself sometimes.”

  Williams noted one puzzler that simply stumped Jimmy. “I remember he couldn’t get the solo on the instrumental break in ‘It’s Late.’ ”

  It was a tricky glissando that slid up a few frets and pulled off another string, really bent it, to create a twangy hiccup effect. Remarkably, Rod Wyatt, the schoolmate who’d tuned Jimmy’s first guitar, had it all worked out and spent a Saturday morning teaching him the fingering. While Rod was at it, they also tackled the riff on “My Babe,” another Burton creation that required some effort. The two boys met regularly at Jimmy’s to practice and swap pointers they’d picked up. Over time, they exhausted the James Burton and Cliff Gallup oeuvres. Jimmy could play those babies blindfolded, according to Wyatt, “That was the style and guitar sound we loved best in those days.”

  It was fine to listen and learn from records, but Jimmy needed to see it in action. He and Dave Williams took to loitering outside Epsom’s Ebbisham Hall on Friday nights. On weekends the town elders, desperate to keep their teenagers off the streets, renamed the drab church facility the Contemporary Club, where the kids could congregate and dance to local groups. “We were too young to get in,” Williams recalls, “so Jimmy and I’d sneak around to the fire door and listen to the bands that were playing inside.”

  Their favorite act was Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds. The band was like hundreds of others in England that made their bones playing cover versions of the hits of the day. The Thunderbirds, however, had two aces in the hole that separated them from the pack. Chris Farlowe could really sing. He had a husky, bluesy delivery that could take the shine off a copper penny. His version of “Stormy Monday” was a drop-dead showstopper, as were the Jimmy Reed numbers he belted out. And he was the first of the local crooners to tackle “Just a Dream” and “My Babe,” which struck seductive chords with the crowd. He also had Bobby Taylor on guitar.

  By local standards, Bobby Taylor was an astonishing virtuoso. “Bobby was so influential,” says John Spicer, who later played alongside Jimmy in Neil Christian & the Crusaders. “He had a funky style that was so infectious and really exploded out of his guitar.”

  “Jimmy idolized Bobby Taylor,” Dave Williams recalls. “Once we were able to talk our way into the hall, we’d stand at the back and watch him play solos on any number of amazing Jimmy Reed songs. Jimmy couldn’t take his eyes off Bobby.”

  He’d rush home and try to duplicate the solos from memory, but it required an even better guitar—an actual electric guitar, not some jerry-rigged replica. Jimmy badly wanted a Fender Stratocaster. In the late 1950s, it was still impossible to buy one in England. Sister Rosetta Tharpe had played one during an early tour of the country, but as far as Jimmy knew, only two had been imported into the UK. Cliff Richard had bought one for his sidekick, Hank Marvin, and Bobby Taylor had the other. That was it. Until Fender made them available, British guitarists settled for f-hole archtops or hollowbodies that had been the only option for jazz and dance-band musicians. There were hints, however, that that was about to change. Tony Sheridan, a flashy British rocker who performed with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, had appeared on TV with an approximation of a Fender. It was a Grazioso, a Czech knockoff of a Stratocaster, close enough for Jimmy, who found one at an accordion shop in nearby Surbiton.

  Now he was in business.

  [3]

  Late in 1958, with a new guitar in tow, Jimmy Page was ready to play his first-ever paying gig. He’d arranged a date at the Epsom Comrades Club, a typical veterans’ watering hole southeast of the High Street accustomed to having live music on the weekend. Jimmy had been rehearsing with a small pickup combo—an acoustic guitar player who sang a bit and an older, accomplished pianist. Their set was nothing to marvel at: Cliff Richard’s “Move It,” which was a staple of every band from Penzance to the Orkneys; “Red River Rock” to show off Jimmy’s chops; a couple of Elvis tunes; and a sampling of lightweight pop hits of the day. Be that as it may, Jimmy couldn’t wait to play them in front of a live audience.

  Dave Williams, who’d been enlisted to hump Jimmy’s amp to the gig, had even scrounged up a couple dates, two fifteen-year-old neighborhood girls, Anna and Gillian. “It was a pretty sketchy affair,” Anna recalls. “The club was bare bones, a few tables with chairs around them, a bar at one end, and a little dance area. The band wasn’t bad. Jimmy seemed to know what he was doing.” Halfway through the set, however, things went sideways. The elderly crowd, paying no attention to the music, realized the piano player could play tunes they could waltz to—World War II pub and patriotic songs. And every time he fulfilled a request, someone in the room bought him a pint. Slowly but surely, the pianist got smashed.

  This complicated matters. Jimmy and Dave had expectations for the after-gig festivities. Dave’s father was conveniently out of town; that left the boys with an empty house for the after-party with their dates. Now the pianist was shit-faced, and someone was going to have to get him home. “Jimmy and I both fancied Anna,” Williams recalled. “So we drew straws to see who would take her home. The other guy was responsible for getting the pianist into a taxi.” Jimmy lost. Fifty-five years later, Williams is still married to Anna.

  But Jimmy Page was just warming up.

  He’d been noodling around Surrey with an ad hoc band called the Paramounts. As performers, they didn’t have much going for them, limited mostly to playing instrumentals, like “Guitar Boogie Shuffle,” “Red River Rock,” and the Peter Gunn theme, so that Jimmy could shine. Despite that, throughout the summer of 1959, they handled opening-act chores at the Contemporary Club in Epsom. One of the headliners they routinely worked with was Red E. Lewis & the Red Caps, a well-regarded unit on the local club and dance-hall circuit, whose singer had a Gene Vincent fixation and the perfect gruff tenor to deliver rock ’n roll. John Spicer, the bass player, recalls how Jimmy used to hang around their van at the end of gigs. “He’d talk to us as we packed up the gear. He was always interested in what our guitarist, Bobby Oats, was playing and occasionally borrowed Bobby’s solidbody guitar to show us what he could do.”

  Toward the end of the summer, Bobby Oats was accepted into drama school and announced he was leaving the Red Caps. Spicer recalls the dilemma faced by the rest of the band and their manager, Chris Tidmarsh. “We had to come up with another guitar player, and quick,” he says. “Chris and Red were both enamored of Jimmy. They said, ‘The kid’s only fifteen, but he can play, he’s fantastic.’ It was decided to invite him to a rehearsal in London to see if he fit into the band.”

  In a room above the Red Lion, a rundown, working-class pub in Shoreditch, the Red Caps put Jimmy through the paces, playing all the highlights from their set. “He knew every single number, all the solos—the James Burton and Cliff Gallup licks—all our routines, everything note-perfect,” Spicer says. “I was knocked out. I remember thinking, ‘This skinny kid is the best guitarist I’ve ever heard.’ ”

  It was love at first sight. The rest of the Red Caps made it unanimous. Jimmy Page was invited to be their guitar player on the spot. Only one hurdle remained. “We had to convince his parents to let him come up to London to join a rock ’n roll band.”

  Although Jimmy believed his parents “were very encouraging,” when it came to a full-time gig, James Page Sr. was no pushover. He was rough on his son, not warm or affectionate. Friends say he never called Jimmy by his name. To his father, Jimmy was always Boy, as in “Boy, take out the trash” or “Boy, clean up your room.” He expected Jimmy to finish school and pass exams, not run around the home counties with a half-baked rock ’n roll band. But even James Page Sr. was no match for the silver-tongued Chris Tidmarsh. He laid the charm on thick, made it sound as though the band was in the same league as the London Philharmonic. According to Jimmy, “He reassured my parents and said he’d keep a watchful eye on this young lad.” Tidmarsh even threw in a cash incentive. “If I promise to pay [Jimmy] £15 a week, would you consider him playing in the group?” Fifteen pounds was nothing to sneeze at; it was more than Mr. Page was making. But—no, still no, the boy had to take his O-level exams and finish school. It was only when Tidmarsh assured him that the gigs would all be weekend dates and he would personally drive young Jimmy home afterward that Mr. Page gave his consent.

  The promise of weekend-only gigs lasted about as long as the first weekend. The Red Caps were a working band with a demanding dance card, and pretty soon they leaned on Jimmy’s parents to let him take the train to London after his school day was over in order to fill that card with weeknight gigs. Reluctantly, and with caveats, Mr. Page gave in. Most nights, each man made about £2, just enough to get by. When there were no club dates, Tidmarsh hired function rooms above pubs in North London or local church halls and promoted their own shows for 100 percent of the door. They played within a hundred-mile radius of London almost every night of the week, upholding the promise to drive Jimmy home afterward, often getting to Epsom at three o’clock in the morning. It was all Jimmy could do to keep up the routine. He was burning the candle at both ends.