LynneC’s review of Light and Shade : Conversations with Jimmy Page by Brad Tolinski
Nonfiction/Autobiography published by Crown Oct 12
I’m writing a series about rock musicians, Nightstar, so I’ve been immersing myself in rock music and stories about the musicians. Some of my wasted youth was spent hanging around rock musicians (no, not that), and rock music always finds its way onto my current playlist. So when I had the opportunity to read this book, I grabbed it eagerly.
Screeds have been written about who the best rock guitarist is. Overall winner in any chart is usually given to Jimi Hendrix, but he was more of a shooting star, an unbelievable talent who burst on the scene and then just as quickly left it. Hendrix surrounded himself with musicians who weren’t worthy of him. He deserved better than some of the musicians he worked with on a regular basis, and, consequently, some of his records are flawed, and not a patch on what he was like live. He was nothing short of astounding. Yes, I saw him, once, just before his death. Always in my top ten, too.
But influential? Trail blazing? Sure, but not as much as some of the other guitarists who usually feature on these lists. They tend to be comprised of dazzling talents, men like Hendrix and Carlos Santana, who live and breathe guitar and people who care about music and deploy their axes in the service of the song or the piece, like Clapton or Jonny Greenwood or the subject of this book, Jimmy Page.
Page was born in the south of England, a short distance from where Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton were practicing in front of their bedroom mirrors. There’s a fascinating early TV recording of Page playing with a skiffle group and talking about being a scientist when he grows up. A nice, clean-cut boy enjoying his music, but with no intention of making it his career. Either he was lying or the guitar hadn’t the hold on him it got later.
Page is almost deceptive. Because before he became the wild guitarist of rock’s wildest and most hedonistic band, he was a session musician. It’s estimated that Page played on around 60% of the hits of the early and mid sixties, before, as he says, the bands learned how to play their own instruments and the session men and women started to spend more time on novelty records and jingles. He’d show up for work in the morning, play on a few records, and go home. That’s how he learned his craft, by using the techniques required and doing his job right. He became one of the country’s top session men, and only boredom drove him to do something different. He played on “Tobacco Road” by the Nashville Teens, “It’s Not Unusual” by Tom Jones, and The Kinks “You Really Got Me.”
That early experience is really important, because it reveals the hidden side of Jimmy Page. During the years when Led Zeppelin ruled the world, he was a dazzling, outlandish hippy-ish figure playing what sounded like impossible pieces on his collection of guitars. But behind that image lay a gifted technician, someone who knew the effects he wanted and, more often than not, the way he’d achieve them. He produced, or helped produce, all Zeppelin’s albums. The band that never released a single in the UK. Why bother, when they could sell albums in the same numbers? Besides, the single wasn’t their forte. Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones was the riff-meister. While Page produced riffs that could rival any of Keef’s (“Rock and Roll,” “Communication Breakdown”) his forte was more the atmospheric extended beauty of “Kashmir” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You” (a track I listen to almost every day of my life, and it has still to pall).
So Jimmy Page made the Led Zeppelin albums sound good or, I should say, even better. At the time they stood out for the production values, in a time when people were buying extra wonderful stereos and quads to make the most of albums by bands like Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. They stand out today for the crispness and quality of the sound, the lack of homogeneity. Each track is showcased as the best it can be.
That was, until the band hit the stage. Zeppelin had a presence rarely touched by other bands. They owned arenas. And that was due in part to Page’s other gift—his showmanship. Yes, I’ve seen them too.
This book goes into all that by interviews with colleagues, other musicians, and Page himself. It’s a record of how a great musician comes to be. His journey is like no other, but so are the other musicians’. Where the Stones were always a unit, solid and enduring, Page has seen several phases to his career—the Yardbirds, a legendary band of the sixties, Zeppelin, the film music he’s created and his other solo projects, sometimes in collaboration with other musicians, sometimes on his own.
Radiohead said of “OK Computer” that its success set them free to do what they wanted to do, instead of being pressurized to do more of the same. Page knew his way around the scene, he knew engineers, producers, people who could help him make things happen, so that when Zeppelin came about, he knew what he wanted to do with the band, the direction he wanted to take, and he had the wherewithal to do it. Into that he brought three great musicians, people who really understood their craft and how to achieve what they wanted—cool, collected John Paul Jones, one of the greatest bassists I’ve ever seen (although I’d take Entwistle over him and probably Bootsie Collins, but Jones had as much talent as Page with other instruments and production skills); John Bonzo Bonham, a jaw-droppingly talented drummer, who could do anything and then do it again (his son Jason plays with Page sometimes); and Robert Plant, whose voice is simply the best, and whose songwriting skills matched Page’s musicianship.
What this book doesn’t do is go deeply into Page’s private life. There is mention of the tragedies and the failures—he talks about the illness that curtailed his early career, the personal tragedy that rocked the band when Robert Plant lost his son to a virus and then suffered a car crash that nearly killed him, Page’s own dabbling in magick and Aleister Crowley’s work, and his drug addiction. But it doesn’t wallow in it, just discusses it as a background to his music and the career. But there’s no muckraking here, no losing sight of what really matters in the face of juicy scandal.
I think he gets the balance right. “Jimmy Page” is a very readable attempt at tracing the career of one of the most important musicians to come out of the classic rock era. It’s a must for any music fan.
Is it any wonder that I write about rock musicians? (You hang around them long enough, you learn that the term “rock star” makes most of them wince). Oh yes, and can I just say – sex on a stick!
Grade: A
Summary:
This “oral autobiography” of Jimmy Page, the intensely private mastermind behind Led Zeppelin—one of the most enduring bands in rock history—is the most complete and revelatory portrait of the legendary guitarist ever published.
More than 30 years after disbanding in 1980, Led Zeppelin continues to be celebrated for its artistic achievements, broad musical influence, and commercial success. The band’s notorious exploits have been chronicled in bestselling books; yet none of the individual members of the band has penned a memoir nor cooperated to any degree with the press or a biographer. In Light & Shade, Jimmy Page, the band’s most reticent and inscrutable member, opens up to journalist Brad Tolinski, for the first time exploring his remarkable life and musical journey in great depth and intimate detail.Based on extensive interviews conducted with the guitarist/producer over the past 20 years, Light & Shade encompasses Page’s entire career, beginning with his early years as England’s top session guitarist when he worked with artists ranging from Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, and Burt Bacharach to the Kinks, The Who, and Eric Clapton. Page speaks frankly about his decadent yet immensely creative years in Led Zeppelin, his synergistic relationships with band members Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones, and his notable post-Zeppelin pursuits. While examining every major track recorded by Zeppelin, including “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Kashmir,” Page reflects on the band’s sensational tours, the filming of the concert movie The Song Remains the Same, his fascination with the occult, meeting Elvis Presley, and the making of the rock masterpiece Led Zeppelin IV, about which he offers a complete behind-the-scenes account. Additionally, the book is peppered with “sidebar” chapters that include conversations between Page and other guitar greats, including his childhood friend Jeff Beck and hipster icon Jack White.
Through Page’s own words, Light and Shade presents an unprecedented first-person view of one of the most important musicians of our era.
Read an excerpt.
