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Interviews with Jimmy Page - 2015.


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Under the spell of Jimmy Page

BRAD WHEELER

Contributed to The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jul. 31, 2015

So, I was talking magic with Jimmy Page recently.

“You mean the alchemy of Led Zeppelin,” the man himself says, his Middlesex accent precise, his intonation elfishly elegant. “That the four musical elements of the band made a fifth?”

For the purposes of this conversation, sure, that’s what I mean. The Led Zeppelin guitarist (and disciple of English occultist Aleister Crowley) was in Toronto recently to promote the expanded reissues of the band’s final three albums – Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda – and to remind us about his coffee-table tome from 2014, Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page.

We’re at the Masonic Temple, the Yonge Street building that Page visited in 1969 with the ascending Zeppelin. Back then, the temple housed the Rock Pile concert venue, where the young Robert Plant moaned about clumsy citrus situations (lemon juice running down his leg) and sang songs concerning extended sexual adventures: Train Kept A-Rollin’ (“all night long”) and You Shook Me (“all night long”).

I had requested that our interview take place in the Red Room, the velvety chamber in which Masonic rituals once took place. The request was refused. Furthermore, I was not to ask the 71-year-old Page about his personal life, his drug history or any possible, future, much-hoped-for Led Zeppelin reunion.

When I asked Page about a possible, future, much-hoped-for Led Zeppelin reunion, the maestro remembers being asked the same question in 2008, at a press conference during the Toronto International Film Festival for It Might Get Loud, the documentary starring himself and fellow guitarists Jack White and U2’s The Edge. “That was six years ago, and people are still asking. But there hasn’t been any communication [within the band].”

Back to the magic, then. Was Page familiar with Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the 2004 novel by Susanna Clarke that had been adapted for a current BBC television series? Not so much, but he had heard about it. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is set in mid-19th-century England, the premise being that “classical magicians” no longer performed magic – they only studied it. “Great feats of magic are read about in books,” one of the show’s stuffier characters explains, “not seen in streets.”

I suggest to Page that classic rock today is in that same moribund, half-theoretical state. “Ah, I see what you’re getting at,” he says, taking off his heavy, dark shades. (And thank god for that. With Page’s all-black attire and silver hair pulled back tight into a ponytail, for all I knew, the man in front of me was the German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.)

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In person, Page is gracious, dignified and interested. He’s not naturally inclined to give a “back in my day things were better” opinion, and so instead offers up modern bands Royal Blood and the Arctic Monkeys as examples of today’s great rock and rollers.

The Blood, the Monkeys – they’re doing a different thing though. Where’s the grand vision of the Who’s Quadrophenia, the widescreen-headphone scope of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, the giant angst and iconic riffs of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, the weird scenes inside the goldmine of the Doors, to say nothing of the colossal blues, ominous Kashmir opulence and towering misty-mountain majesty of Zeppelin?

I mean to say: Where’s the magic? Where’s the Gibson double-neck? Give a rock guitarist a violin bow today and he or she will use it only to scratch their back, and not in any Dazed and Confused way.

“Okay, got it,” Page says, catching my drift. “You see, in the 1960s and into the ’70s, everyone in their own way was trying to open up the musical horizon. There shouldn’t be a wall that you’re going toward and bouncing off. Our intent with Led Zeppelin was not to get caught up in the singles’ market, but to make albums where you could really flex your muscles – your musical intellect, if you like – and challenge yourself. And that’s what was happening with all these bands.”

To cite an example of his own boundary-pushing, Page brings up Achilles Last Stand, a guitar-orchestrated marathon in E minor off 1976’s Presence. “I wanted to do something that was really an epic,” says Page, about the 10-and-a-half-minute track. “I had it all in my head. I wanted to get it all onto tape, to show people, ‘This is what I’ve been talking about for so long. This is it.’”

Page’s lavish overdubs were done in one night. “It’s a personal achievement. It’s a guitar milestone, no doubt about it.”

But what about Plant’s words, with lines about “riding the wind, to tread the air above the din, to … ”

“It’s freedom,” says Page, gently interrupting my reading of the lyrics. “Robert is singing about freedom.”

Okay, but let’s apply the lyrics to you in 2015 – the bits about sleeping now, to rise again.

“I’m leading the charge,” Page responds, speaking proudly of the massive Zeppelin reissue project he’s helmed. “I’m riding the stallion.”

Yes, but you’ve put out your book, and the reissue campaign is complete. What’s next for Jimmy Page? Will it get loud again?

“It will get loud again,” he says, “but it will be a quiet whisper at the same time. The whisper will be deafening.”

Makes sense – Page and Zeppelin basically invented the loud-soft dynamic of classic rock. The guitarist has new music written; the next step will be to work out the arrangements and to figure in what way he will present it. “I haven’t got an answer to that at the moment. But I tell you what, I’ll have one by the end of the year.”

With that, Page’s assistant gives the wrap-this-thing-up sign, and I hear the bluesy languor of In My Time of Dying in my head. One wonders, after working through the complete studio catalogue of the band, what feelings is Page left with, when it comes to the Led Zeppelin legacy.

“It’s good to be in a position to know that I’ve inspired musicians, from what I’ve learned to lay down personally, and collectively with Led Zeppelin,” he says. “If you listen to our work, from Led Zeppelin I to Coda, it’s just a fantastic textbook.”

A textbook, or an artifact.

Biographies on Zeppelin are titled Hammer of the Gods and When Giants Walked the Earth. Rock stars no longer throw televisions from their rooms at the Hyatt (a.k.a. the Riot House) on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, for the windows are now sealed. Heavy dust is on the era – we will never see the Zeppelin kind again.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/under-the-spell-of-jimmy-page/article25802020/

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...And a band?

"There’s no musicians I’ve worked with, there’s no musicians I want to work with at the moment.”...

-Jane Stevenson

http://www.torontosun.com/2015/07/31/jimmy-page-says-goodbye-to-led-zeppelin-with-final-reissues

So if he is working on something it's going to be him playing the guitar and nothing else? No singers or other instruments involved?

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BOOM 97.3 - The Final Three pages
A Jimmy Page Retrospective

Join Stu Jeffries and Jimmy Page as they look back at the final three Led Zeppelin albums: “Presence”, “In Through The Out Door” and “Coda”. The three albums that chronicle the final years of the bands 1970s reign are reissued and available this weekend in their super deluxe boxset. This is your chance to hear legendary guitarist/producer Jimmy Page reminisce about remastering the albums in a rare one hour special “The Final Three Pages: A Jimmy Page Retrospective”.

http://thefinalthreepages.ca/boom973

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Jimmy Page on 'Coda,' Led Zep's Indian Sojourn and His Next Big Project

With an expansive reissue of the 1982 LP in the rearview mirror, the guitarist opens up to David Fricke

By David Fricke | August 4, 2015

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It is, Jimmy Page declares proudly, "the mother of all Codas – an absolute celebration of Led Zeppelin, all things bright and beautiful, all of the curios." The Led Zeppelin guitarist pauses and grins. "It's cool."

Over his morning coffee in a New York hotel suite, Page is marking the end of his year-long reissue of Zeppelin's studio catalog, in deluxe editions with previously unreleased material, with a rare, extended look back at "the most difficult album I had to approach" – Coda, a half-hour of outtakes compiled by Page and released in 1982, two years after he, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones quietly disbanded following the death of drummer John Bonham. "It was put to me that there was another album due," Page recalls. "It was contractual. I was like, 'Oh my God, no.'"

The weight of obligation showed on the original LP; three of the eight tracks were left-behind songs from Zeppelin's last, least compelling studio album, 1979's In Through the Out Door. But that was then. Reissued on July 31st along with new editions of In Through the Out Door and 1976's Presence, the deluxe Coda is now essential Zeppelin, a three-disc, 23-track account of the band's studio life in illuminating rarities, including the 1970 B-side "Hey, Hey What Can I Do"; "Sugar Mama," a bluesy grenade from the 1968 sessions for Led Zeppelin; two exotic jewels from Page and Plant's 1972 evening in a Bombay studio with members of an Indian orchestra; and a revelatory test run of "When the Levee Breaks" from Led Zeppelin IV.

The '82 Coda was, Page now admits, "an attempt to make something out of very little – or nothing." The reboot, in turn, "has all of the quirkiness, the totally unexpected aspect of things" that characterized Zeppelin's ascent on record throughout the Seventies. In a story in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Page also speaks about his immediate plans as a solo artist – "To pick up the guitar, and I won't stop from that point on" – and remembers the crushing helplessness he felt after Bonham's death: "I didn't want to play the guitar . . . It was going to bring up too much."

In these additional excerpts from that conversation, Page goes long on Coda, especially that Indian sojourn, and his short-lived spell as a composer for films, anthologized in Page's recent, independently released four-disc set, Soundtracks. He also drops a hint about a future archival mission: his 1967-'68 work with the Yardbirds. "I've got enough recordings of the Yardbirds to make it interesting," Page claims. "Now that I'm finished with Led Zeppelin, I have a chance to talk to them – as long as it doesn't get in the way of my guitar project."

How much of your heart did you put into compiling the original Coda? It was only two years after Bonham's death.

It didn't feel like two years. It still felt like yesterday. That was the most difficult album I had to approach. I knew that it was just going to be things that were left over. It couldn't be current. We'd lost John. We couldn't do another album. It sold really well under the circumstances. But it was a compromise.

What was the first outtake that came to mind, that got you started?

It didn't take long for the light to come on. We had "Bonzo's Montreux." The other members didn't know what it was, because I'd done it with John in Montreux [in September 1976], between the recording of Presence and In Through the Out Door. For me, "Bonzo's Montreux" was the backbone of Coda.

I had the multi-tracks of it and started working on the mixing, making sense of what was originally laid down. I also had this other mix [now a bonus track on the deluxe Coda] of John's drums without the top-line steel-drum effect which I got through a harmonizer at the time. That one's great for people who love Bonham, just to feel those drums.

One of the most striking outtakes now in the deluxe Coda is "If It Keeps on Raining" – a true, alternate reading from 1970 of "When the Levee Breaks," eventually released on Led Zeppelin IV.

It might be a tail-end thing to III. But it's months before we go into Headley Grange [to record IV], before we heard that drum sound in the stairwell. By then, it was probably "Remember that thing we did? Let's revisit that."

There is lot more blues nuance in Robert's singing in that first version. There is more North Africa in your guitar too.

It's like a mantra, the whole thing. It's a cool version. Most bands would have stopped there. "That's good enough for the next album." I wanted to think about it further. I'd always give anything a reasonable try.

It was all exploration, right from the first album [Led Zeppelin, 1969]. As time went on, we had more time to go into the studio. We could do different attempts at songs. And as the producer, I was in the studio more than the others. I had quite an encyclopedic knowledge of what was there. It got to the point that when I played the companion disc for [the reissue of] III to Robert and John [Paul Jones], they were really surprised at what they heard. Robert, after a certain length of time into [the previously unissued cover] "Key to the Highway," he went, "Oh, I remember that now." John didn't even know it existed, because it was something I did with Robert. There were a lot of surprises in this project – not just for the listening public, but for the band.

What would have caused you to put "If It Keeps on Raining" to the side in 1970?

Because it's not complete. There is a whole section in the middle where there would have been another vocal. It doesn't get to that. It was a test run. I wanted to get this riff going.

I'm surprised that "Sugar Mama" is an outtake from the first album. It sounds a lot more like Led Zeppelin II in its textures and dynamics.

I know what you mean. The thing is "Sugar Mama" got mixed later. That's not the original mix that was done at the time of the album. It was done for Coda. I had the song going into "Poor Tom" in the original lineup. But I thought, "I don't know. I'll not put this out now." It's short, sweet and sappy. Now everybody goes, ‘Great, play it on the radio."

That's probably why I wasn't so keen to put it on the first album. I didn't think it was heavyweight enough. A really concise statement on a shorter scale is "Good Times Bad Times." "Sugar Mama" couldn't follow that. And it wasn't going to go next to "Dazed and Confused." The intent of that first album was its intensity. The sequencing was very important, the way everything sets up the next number.

A Passage to India

You have finally released the Indian versions of "Friends" and "Four Hands" [a.k.a "Four Sticks"], which you recorded with Robert in what was then Bombay in 1972. Those tracks are unusual in two ways. It's the only time you and Robert formally recorded away from the band during its lifetime. And it's the only time, in those years, that you recut previously released songs.

I'd been affected by Indian music in my teens. When I was a session musician, I was paying attention to a lot of it – not the film music but the North and South Indian classical music. But I wanted to work with the source. I had visited Bombay after touring Australia with the Yardbirds. And I'd used a tabla player on the first album (on "Black Mountain Side").

I was keen to see if it was possible to go in with an acoustic guitar and have a conversation, a communion, with musicians there. When I originally wrote the structure of "Friends" [on Led Zeppelin III], I was thinking of Indian music – those string lines we allude to. I knew that song was the most immediate thing that would work.

Was that trip a stopover for you and Robert during a vacation?

No, it was a setup. I requested a tabla player and a mridingam, a double-headed drum. Also a shenai, a sarangai and the [classical] string players. It was a challenge. There was no arranger, apart from me. I had a translator. I'd be like, "Gentlemen, it goes like this." I'd play it for them, then tell the sarangai player to start it off. Then I'd go through the stops and starts in the song, the changes, illustrating to the strings where they played. Then it got the point where Robert could have a sing-along.

By that point, the whole experience was a success – the possibility of working with musicians who have never heard you, don't know your music.

And building to that moment.

Absolutely. We did two takes, and one of them is that one you've heard. But I didn't want to let the moment go. We only have an evening. So I thought, "These percussionists are good. We'll do 'Four Sticks' [from Led Zeppelin IV]." That was trickier. They played in unusual time signatures, but what they didn't do was swap things around. Something might be in 16 beats, but there would be four, complete rounds of that. This swaps over. Robert wasn't singing on this – he's sitting there quietly in the corner. And I don't play guitar either. I just wanted the beauty of what they're doing. It was absolutely wonderful.

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If the recordings were such a success, why didn't you release them at the time?

Because it was an experiment, to see how possible it was to work with these musicians. The master plan was that if we were going to Australia or Japan to tour, it might be interesting to stop in Cairo, record with an orchestra there, then move to India and do something there. It was rather ambitious. Peter Grant, the manager, tried to work it out. There was some talk of the Indian air force flying the equipment around. But it didn't get to be.

That's the way things are. You come up with ideas. And sometimes they're not so successful. But I thought that recording was a real success – in the space of an evening.

Designed to Disturb

You recently issued a four-disc set of your Seventies and Eighties film music – the scores to Lucifer Rising and Death Wish II with extra material. That was an experimental area that you ultimately did not pursue.

Lucifer Rising was basically a solo project. I'm playing all of the instruments, like keyboards. That's something that didn't involve somebody else.

My work then was basically Led Zeppelin. If I wasn't touring, I was writing stuff, thinking of the next album. Once I had a home studio, I wanted to experiment with textures and sound. Was it going to be run of the mill or experimental? [Laughs] Sure as hell, it was going to be experimental.

The sheer quirkiness of it – you put that on and turn the lights out. You might get white knuckles after awhile. It's designed to disturb. But isn't that the same mindset that I have applied to all of it? I've always tried to push beyond what I've already done, all the way through.

Death Wish II was your first commercial film project. Did you feel like a beginner?

Not really. [Director] Michael Winner put two and two together. His next-door neighbor was this guy in Led Zeppelin. "Wouldn't it be a good idea if I had him do the music in this film?" He thought I was just going to give a few melodies, a few top lines for someone else to put together. I did 45 minutes of music for a 90-minute film – too much really. But I love a challenge, to manifest something out of nothing.

Why didn't you do any more film work?

I'd already done it. It was a challenge – I was done. Why did I only put out one solo single in 1965 ["She Just Satisfies"}? Why did I only do one solo album in 1988 [Outrider]? Well, that's all that was necessary. I didn't want to milk it [laughs].

After working on the Zeppelin reissues, is there anything you have learned – about the music, yourself, your life in the band – that you didn't know before? That may come in handy as you finally start new solo work?

Basically . . . [Pauses]. It's an affirmation, really – how you thought, how you put things together, how you do it now.

You believe you made all of the right choices at the time. That's what affirmation means.

It is [smiles].

You can say, "I was right."

I certainly didn't get it wrong. That's for sure. There might be certain areas where it's questionable. I can say, "Maybe I wasn't right, but I certainly wasn't wrong."

And I'm ready to have another go.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/jimmy-page-on-coda-led-zeps-indian-sojourn-and-his-next-big-project-20150804

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Jimmy Page Discusses Led Zeppelin’s Reissue Series (The Interview)

Written by: Jeff Slate

“We were enormously creative, always pushing ourselves,” Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin’s legendary guitarist and founder tells me when I ask why he thinks the band’s albums have stood the test of time.

“If I was off the road I was writing songs for the next album. I wasn’t somebody who was sort of producing other bands and making hay while the sun shined. I didn’t want to do that. I was more into seeing how far I could personally push myself. I just wanted to keep coming up with new things that would inspire the others, and they were all the same way. It didn’t stop, especially as far as the studio went.”

It’s the fourth time in 14 months that I’ve sat down with Page, as part of the promotional juggernaut that saw each of Led Zeppelin’s nine core albums released in remastered and expanded versions, complete with companion discs for each that amounted to alternate versions of each album, offering insight into the band’s creative process and more than a few gems that stand proudly alongside the Zeppelin canon proper.

The reissues have also been, not surprisingly, enormously popular, selling by the truckload all over the world to fans both old and new.

Jimmy-Page-2014-2-Photo-credit-Ross-Half

Photo: Ross Halfin

When we first spoke, in May of 2014, just prior to the release of the reissues of Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III, Page was cagey.

While he was charming and clearly still as enamored with the band that made him a household name as the rest of us, it was obvious he had a few tricks up his sleeve that he was unwilling to share until the time was right.

With all nine releases behind him now, he seems more open, and happy to reflect and talk about the making of the final three Led Zeppelin studio albums, 1976s bluesy Presence, its keyboard driven follow-up In Through the Out Door, from 1979, and 1982′s Coda, released two years after the untimely death of drummer John Bonham.

“It’s on the Internet that it took 18 days to make,” Page begins, referring to the sessions for Presence. “It was fractionally longer. Probably 20 days. I always said it was three weeks. Anyway, we had a plan for that year, an extensive plan which involved touring, and revisiting the idea of filming the band on stage and making sure everything was covered, all the verses were covered, more detail on the instruments and all that, and then to do the album. Then Robert had a car accident in Rhodes (Greece). He was in a cast. It was obvious that we had to really consider what time we had and what we were going to do with it. But Robert was still really keen to make an album. The rest of the band were staying in Malibu. Not in the same house – we had different accommodations – but we had rehearsal rooms set up in LA, and we’d go in there, starting the process of writing. Certainly from my point of view, with Robert in a cast, the writing was being done in a really urgent way. So then we moved over en masse to Munich to record, and by that time there was a feeling of overall defiance to everything, to the situation. Robert was singing his heart out, and everyone was playing incredibly well. Not that they don’t everywhere else, but there was a certain intensity to the Presence sessions.

“There was a very live feeling to the music. Some numbers were made up in the studio. For Your Life is one that I came up with there and then. It was immediately one Robert wanted to do, and again, as I say, he was just singing his heart out. Achilles Last Stand was a number that we had rehearsed in LA. What we’d rehearsed was the running order of the song, the arrangement if you like. And I had all these ideas for the guitar overdubs, so when we got to Musicland (studios in Munich) to record the number – we probably recorded more than one number on that day, two or three songs – afterward the others went out to a club. That night I just set about putting everything that I’d heard, envisaged in my head, I just set about laying it down. It was all done in the space of one night. The guys went off having done the track and when they came in the next day I said, ‘Well, listen to this!’ And there was this great guitar orchestra. They went, ‘Wow!’ It was pretty astonishing. I’m only saying that, not to blow my own trumpet about the guitar overdubs being done in one night, but more as an example of just how intense it was, and how it was almost channeling. It was channeling. And it was channeling at that point from everybody. The drive and focus at the time we were making Presence was just really extreme.”

We break for coffee, but Page is just getting started. He’s keen to discuss 1979s In Through The Out Door, and his memories of the sessions are vivid and finely detailed.

“Should we put it in context?” he asks as we restart our interview. Of course.

“There was talk of doing another album,” Page begins. “I’d managed to get studio time offered to me by the people in ABBA at Polar Studios. They were very generous with it. I thought, ‘That’s cool.’ I knew it was going to be a state-of-the-art studio, because I’d seen all of their outboard equipment, and I was salivating at the idea of getting in there. I’m a producer at heart. So we started to do some rehearsals and John Paul Jones came in with this Yamaha Dream Machine. Stevie Wonder had one of them, and I think the title says it all for a keyboard player. It was really a dream machine. So he’d had it at home and had been working on it and he actually came in with some songs. That’s what he had, some songs. He’d never written complete songs before, so it was like, ‘Oh, wow! He’s really inspired.’ It was cool. I’d done all the writing on Presence, most of the stuff all the way through, actually. So to have John Paul Jones say, ‘Hey, look what I’ve done’, it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool.’ Of course, by the fourth album Robert was writing all the lyrics, so he started putting lyrics to these songs, and it seems the perfect extension for the next album to have a focus on the keyboards. Keyboards had been on the first album. Keyboards had been shown all the way through. But this was elevating them. This was John Paul Jones’ moment, really.

“So before we had an album which was really an electric guitar album, Presence, but now we had something that focused on the keyboards. We had had some keyboard things in the past, but this was even more so, with the input of his writing. So I could apply my guitar to that in a different way, for sure. And it carried on the tradition that each album sounded different to the one before. But my playing was very different, especially. It was almost like playing to a track that was already done. Then I’d start putting on the filigree work and the solos. I just thought it would be really interesting to try that approach to it. That’s how a producer has to think, but a song like Fool In the Rain, with all the overdubs on that, that sort of stuff, the solo is interesting on that because it’s got a character to the sound. You know what it is straightaway. You hear a little snapshot, and that’s the solo. That approach was applied in a different way on In the Evening, where there’s this duetting of riffs between keyboard and guitar, and you have this thing that’s almost like an explosion, like a demolition, when that guitar comes in. Again, those sessions pushed us, and that really appealed to me, to try different approaches, and led me to using the string bender on the album, and so forth, just using a totally different set of approaches.”

Page is quick to explain that the creative process was still very band-oriented, when I ask about how complete John Paul Jones’ demos were when they began rehearsing the album, but he’s also happy to give credit where credit is due.

“There were songs that I was involved with as well,” Page explains. “But the fact that John Paul Jones came in and had these sort of – a verse, a chorus, middle eight – a more traditional way of writing songs, it seemed to be a natural extension to have a keyboard focus, because the next album it would have been different again, though of course we didn’t get to another album. And, of course, that made it not as urgent as anything like the one before, or the one before that, and it just sounded totally different.”

When I ask if they ever recorded parts separately or individually, Page seems horrified.

“Oh no, never,” Page says, laughing. “We all worked together on it, recording. Everything we did, really. We all wanted to play together. We’d even have Robert doing a guide vocal. That was really necessary, so there would be a guide vocal, even if there was just something written in a draft. It might have been something to simply mark where the voices were going to come in, but it still created a different approach to how we played in the studio, with us all there together. It meant we were laying back a little bit, then pushing it a little bit harder in the breaks of it, between the vocals. That was very important.”

Page is also keen to explain why In Through The Out Door sounds so different to the other Led Zeppelin albums.

“We got to ABBA’s studio, and I knew it was a state-of-the-art studio, because I had heard recordings that were done there,” Page says, remembering the moment more than 35 years ago clearly. “They sounded quite interesting. I’d seen the outboard equipment, and it looked great. But when I got in there and clapped my hands it was totally dead (sounding). We all remember how studios got during the ’80s – really dead sounding – well, they’d already gotten there! It was like, ‘Oh, boy.’ Because we were really used to hearing the drums breathe and so forth. But it meant we had to have a totally different approach to it. And that was absolutely okay. It was cool because it meant we’d have an album out that was going to sound totally different.”

Finally, 1982s Coda wraps up the Led Zeppelin reissue campaign in grand style. At three discs, it’s triple the length of the original release, and includes “everything worth hearing” that was left in Led Zeppelin’s vaults, according to Page.

Upon its release, fans were split. Many were disappointed at Coda’s hodgepodge nature, with tracks taken from every era of the band’s career to make what Page describes as an album that was required to fulfill contractual obligations after Bonham’s death. But he also is quick to defend it.

“It was a celebration!” Page exclaims. “And the new version with the two companion discs gives you new insight into why we didn’t do certain things, why we did other things, why we explored certain avenues. When it was released it split people – some people loved it and some people really hated it – but John wasn’t with us. So it was an official bootleg, in a way. But when I decided to do it I knew we had something on the back-burner: Bonzo’s Montreux. That became the centerpiece, and gave me a focal point to create the rest of the album from multitrack tapes we had. Of course at the time people probably hoped that there was recorded music beyond the point of In Through the Out Door and outside of Polar Studios. But there wasn’t. So it was put together from the multitracks. That’s what it was. Working from the multitracks. Now, for the companion discs, we’re working from quarter-inch tapes – analog tapes – that were made at the time, right across the whole spectrum of the band’s career, and I think it’s really special and even more of a celebration of everything that Led Zeppelin was and is.”

Jimmy-Page-2014-4-Photo-credit-Ross-Half

Photo: Ross Halfin

As we wrap up I try to get Page to talk about his long-rumored solo album. He’s been writing, he says, but has been waiting to begin working in earnest on the project until the Led Zeppelin reissue campaign was completed. Now, with the final batch of reissues hitting stores last week, he says he’ll pick up his acoustic around the house and eventually, soon, head into the studio.

As for what he expects when he does hit the studio?

“I don’t know, because I haven’t recorded for a while,” Page confesses. “I’ll put myself under pressure, that’s for sure. I’d probably – I know this is going to sound very quaint – but I’ll probably want to do it on analog. The whole thing about analog is that you’ve got to make your mind up. It’s the art of creating and capturing a performance. You do get all these sorts of organic flows within the mixing, too. I really want to go in there with that attitude rather than go in there with something where you’ve got so many different options. I don’t want to play it safe. I never did play it safe. You have to be decisive. I’ve always pushed myself right onto the edge of the cliff. I won’t do it any different this time, I expect. That’s just how I do it, really.”

http://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2015/08/05/jimmy-page-led-zeppelin-the-interview-reissues-legacy/

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Spend your weekend diving deep into the legendary Led Zeppelin catalogue with Jimmy Page

By SiriusXM Editors |August 5, 2015

Jimmy-Page-SXM-2.jpg

Jimmy Page, the guitarist and founder of legendary rock group Led Zeppelin, sat down with Deep Tracks (Ch. 27) while in New York to celebrate the band reissuing its final three studio albums — 1976’s Presence, 1979’s In Through The Out Door and 1982’s Coda — with companion audio.

Page, who was in charge of remastering, shared with us some behind-the-scenes stories from the recording of these three albums. Those stories air on Friday, Aug. 7 at 3 pm ET through Monday, Aug. 10 along with songs from the newly remastered albums (including the companion audio).

Check out a preview of the special here: https://soundcloud.com/siriusxmmusic/jimmy-page-explains-led-zeppelins-approach-to-final-album-coda

http://www.siriusxm.ca/spend-your-weekend-diving-deep-into-the-legendary-led-zeppelin-catalogue-with-jimmy-page/

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^ Got excited because I misunderstood the title to what I wanted it to mean, that is, some sort of contest to actually listen with JP :D. That would be amazing... ah well...

^^^ I just read the Financial Times interview and agree 100%, Patrycja! What a great article, and so interesting to weave in the artistic influences. I loved the photos as well. Great job, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney! I hope we continue to hear more like this from Jimmy.

Thanks for posting, Sam!

I agree about the photos, Dd. I love the black and white portraits of Jimmy, but the one in this article lends itself so well to a colour shot because of the setting. And I can't stop staring at the colour shades and fabric folds of 'Flaming June'; it is exquisite.

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^^^

Many thanks, Sam. I like Redbeard. He has always treated Jimmy & Robert with forthrightness and respect.

Agreed. Redbeard is a really good music interviewer/host, have enjoyed him and his shows for years.
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Led Zeppelin’s discography is immortal, thanks to Jimmy Page

by Jeff Slate

“All the way through this, it’s turned out to be everything that I’d hoped it would be,” Jimmy Page tells me of the 14-month-long reissue campaign of Led Zeppelin’s nine studio albums that he’s just completed. “The core catalog is what’s kept us going all the way through. The quality of that has kept us buoyant.”

Forty-six years after Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut, Page doesn’t seem as astonished as some of his classic rock brethren do that his catalog is still a staple of radio, and generates a steady stream of revenue for him, and the other former members of Led Zeppelin, singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones, and the estate of drummer John Bonham, who died in 1980, effectively putting an end to the band’s career.

“Each member of the band was a musical force,” Page explains, looking bright-eyed and fit in all black, sitting on a green Victorian-style couch in his suite near Manhattan’s Gramercy Park. “I chose everyone for exactly that reason, and there was almost instantly this amazing chemistry and really unique sound. So I’m not surprised that the music stands up, actually.”

Not only was Page the band’s guiding force musically, as it’s lead guitarist and producer, but he founded the band based on a vision he’d had of where to go next after leaving a lucrative career as one of London’s top session-guitarists during the mid-1960s, and a stint as the bassist then lead guitarist in the R&B-rock group The Yardbirds. He chose his collaborators for Led Zeppelin carefully, co-wrote most of the band’s songs with Plant, and was in the recording studio seemingly every minute the band was there, shaping the songs that have sold well in excess of 135 million albums worldwide, and continue to find newer, younger audiences with each new generation. In fact, the reissues of Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy last fall outsold Taylor Swift’s 1989 during their first week of release. (Swift’s was the overall top-selling album of 2014.)

“It’s remarkable,” Page says, as much a fan of his former band as any of us. “But it’s a testament to the musicianship, I think, and the songs. We worked very hard at creating something special and different with each album, and I think the new versions, with all of the extra tracks on the companion discs, bear that out.”

Those companion discs, which Page designed to go along with the newly remastered versions of the originals as almost alternate versions of each of Led Zeppelin’s albums, feature rough mixes, works-in-progress, alternate takes, and forgotten gems.

“The best part is, there was no jiggery pokery,” Page says with a smile. “Every mix I used was from the original sessions, from the time the recordings were made. These aren’t newly created. They’re very much of-the-moment.”

That immediacy offers listeners a remarkable glimpse into the band’s creative process. It took Page several years in the studio to remaster the band’s nine albums and put the ten (1982’s Coda has two companion discs) together, but it was a project he dove into with apparent abandon.

“I’d done the Led Zeppelin DVD, and the live album [How The West Was Won (2003)] and then we did the O2 reunion show, which was nice, because it shows us as we are now. But I hadn’t looked into the state of our original albums in quite some time,” Page tells me. Surprised by Robert Plant’s lack of interest in continuing with a tour after the band’s O2 show, Page found himself with time on his hands.

“The idea of this project, to actually have the companion discs to complement each album, and thereby being able to put all these great tracks that deserve to be heard out there, was just for me,” Page says, enthusiastically. “It was the right, honest thing to do. There was a dignity to it. The whole thing was in context, and it gave the Led Zeppelin audience and the fans so much more to be able to digest.”

“It’s cool and I’m quite proud of it,” he adds, “And happy now that it’s reached the end, so people can fully understand what I was trying to do, which I don’t think was clear when we released the first three albums last year, as no one had ever done anything like this before. But, of course, that was what was exciting about it for me. Now everyone knows what the picture is, and they understand what it’s all about, that it’s not just a bit of vinyl or bonus tracks on a CD. This is a really substantial project. It was meant to be that, and it’s wonderful that it has manifested. Not only that, the feedback’s been phenomenal on it, absolutely.”

More than anyone within Led Zeppelin’s universe, Page has been the caretaker of the band’s legacy. But it’s not simply a business for him.

“It was an artistic endeavor,” he admits of the reissue campaign. “It was planned, sure. I had the blueprint of it. I knew it was going to take a while to come out, obviously, because it’s nine albums. And I’m delighted at the way the releases have been scheduled, three of them, two of them, one, and now three again. I’m delighted with that.”

“The only business part of it for me was to actually present all of this studio information to people,” he remarks. “In effect, the equation, when it adds up, it equals twice as much material as was out there in the first place. That can only be good, because in context, if you say Led Zeppelin to somebody, if they’ve heard it, they’re going to get a sound-byte of a riff in their head, and that’s going to be from the original recorded music, for sure. That’s what’s kept us going. But this, for anyone wanting to learn more, and really dig in to what we were doing, this creates almost a whole other universe for them to explore.”

As Page describes, though, the companion discs are practically whole new albums unto themselves. They’re not just a few scattered bonus tracks tacked onto the end of the albums proper, as has become the norm in the music business these days. Instead, they are presented as new, alternate versions of the albums, and full listening experiences, separate and apart from the, admittedly, more fully formed siblings.

“The way that I saw it, they had to stand on their own,” Page notes. “I knew pretty much every tape that existed—as the producer—so from the beginning I knew exactly what I wanted to offer, and I’m glad I took my time and did it that way rather than rushing it or letting someone else, who didn’t know what might work or not work or what was even available, do it.”

As he talks in detail about the albums, and even the sessions that all took place more than 35 years ago, it’s clear that Page’s memory is sharp, regardless of the wild days and wilder rumors that swirled around Zeppelin, perhaps more than any other band.

Does he really remember it all that clearly?

“Oh, good lord, yeah,” Page says, slapping his knee and smiling broadly. “I think I do because I was living it so intensely. To be frank with you, though, even I was thinking, while we were putting this all together, ‘Wow, you really can remember all of this!’ That’s quite astonishing, really. But they were astonishing times.”

http://qz.com/474187/led-zeppelins-discography-is-immortal-thanks-to-jimmy-page/

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Jimmy Page Talks Led Zeppelin Reissues and Legacy, With an Eye on the Future: Exclusive Interview

Jimmy Page has a lot of ideas about what he’d like to do next, now that the final three Led Zeppelin reissues have been released. Page recently discussed those plans, and talked more about his return to Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda, with Paul Shaffer.

Shaffer, of course, just wrapped up more than three decades as the bandleader and sidekick for The Late Show with David Letterman. He continues to host Paul Shaffer’s Day in Rock, a syndicated daily rock history radio feature – and there was, of course, plenty of history to discuss with Jimmy Page.

Read More: Jimmy Page Talks Led Zeppelin Reissues and Legacy, With an Eye on the Future: Exclusive Interview | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/jimmy-page-paul-shaffer-interview/?trackback=tsmclip

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