Uncut Zeppelin

[SIBLY]

My copy of English Magazine Uncut has literally just dropped onto my door mat and there's a rather spectacular picture of James Patrick on the cover. With an article called The Real Jimmy Page by ROBERT PLANT!!!!

It's the best music mag by a country mile not that you need to know that to go in search of this

edition.

http://www.uncut.co.uk/

[TortoiseGeek]

I think I just soiled myself.

Is it the December 08 or Jan 09 edition SIBLY? Is it worthy? I can only find the one with Paul Weller on the front.

[SIBLY]

It's January's edition.

I subscribe and usually get it a day or two before it hits the shops. I haven't had time to read the actual article yet.

[Ram4]

Nice, I'll have to grab that one.

[Roxie]

With an article called The Real Jimmy Page by ROBERT PLANT!!!!

Now if that's not an intriguing headline... I don't know WHAT is!

[Aquamarine]

Quick, scan it and see if it mentions football.

(Thanks for the heads-up. )

[glicine]

Quick, scan it and see if it mentions football.

you just can't let go, can you?

[Aquamarine]

you just can't let go, can you?

Just kidding!

[ally]

Now if that's not an intriguing headline... I don't know WHAT is!

No kidding ! Scan anybody ?

[myledzep]

My copy of English Magazine Uncut has literally just dropped onto my door mat and there's a rather spectacular picture of James Patrick on the cover. With an article called The Real Jimmy Page by ROBERT PLANT!!!!

It's the best music mag by a country mile not that you need to know that to go in search of this

edition.

http://www.uncut.co.uk/

Have you read it yet? What does it say? Sounds fascinating...I'll keep my eyes open for this issue.

Thanks for the 411.

[Carrieanna31]

Quick, scan it and see if it mentions football.

(Thanks for the heads-up. )

I wanna know already ....Chelsea or Hull or Man U? (hope not)

[SIBLY]

I still haven't done more than scan it. One quote which I just bizare is from Andrew Loog Oldham. Talking about The O2 and after he says LZ touring with out RP is like The Stones touring without Prince Michael of Kent! What does that mean?

There's a seperate little article with RP talking about when he and Jimmy used to go of travelling together. Sounds like they had a real fine time. But, it made me sad thinking that they can't get back to that friendship. Sounds like he's got the makings of a brilliant autobiography. That's a band book I would like to read.

I think a scan would be too big to upload. It's 11 pages.

[glicine]

I still haven't done more than scan it. One quote which I just bizare is from Andrew Loog Oldham. Talking about The O2 and after he says LZ touring with out RP is like The Stones touring without Prince Michael of Kent! What does that mean?

Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger was born in Dartford, Kent.

[JTM]

Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger was born in Dartford, Kent.

Loog's comment was a putdown.......I'm sure he knows where Jagger was born.

[beatbo]

In the January issue of UNCUT, we celebrated the career of rock's greatest and most mysterious guitar hero through the first hand accounts of the people who know him best.

Here at Uncut.co.uk, we'll be posting the full and unedited transcripts from those interviews, including words from Robert Plant, Jeff Beck, Donovan, Steve Albini and more.

Today… ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM

The Stones manager and legendary impresario founded Immediate Records in 1965 – promptly hiring Page as house producer and A&R man…

The first time Jimmy Page came into my life I was already doing sessions with either Marianne Faithfull or Vashti Bunyan or The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra. Charlie Katz was our musical fixer at Immediate, a lovely old Jewish gent, and our main guitarists at that time were Big Jim Sullivan, John McLaughlin and Joe Moretti. One day Charlie said to me “You know, I’ve got this new young lad. I think you’ll like him, Andrew.” And I think he may have said “He doesn’t read.”

So there Jimmy was, in Pye Studios or Olympic or wherever the fuck we were, sitting next to Big Jim and the others. And that was the first time I saw him. I think he might have just left Carter-Lewis & The Southerners. So Jimmy’s there on most of our sessions, basically from "As Tears Go By" onwards. I'm not sure if he was on the Gene Pitney stuff, but we're talking April or May ’64.

Do I remember my first reaction to hearing him? Well, you have to remember that we were gatecrashing into a business that hoped we would soon go away. So my first impression of someone was always empathy, meeting guys your own age and wondering if they could work for you. But it was immediately apparent that Jimmy would. He also had to take a while to stretch, but the other session players took him under their wing. So he was on probation for a little while. He didn’t suddenly come in and say “Look, I’m fucking brilliant”. I more recall him working his way in slyly. We offered him the job as in-house producer based really on an affinity of purpose. We were so fed up with old farts that you would gravitate towards people your own age. It was all in the nod, the look in the eye. And I saw that in Jimmy. It was apparent that he knew that too.

I don’t think it was ever my agenda to discover what a great guitar player he was. I didn’t look at him that way. I used to do a lot of elaborate demos of Mick and Keith’s songs and I know Jimmy played on one of those, which I think ended up as the first “Heart Of Stone”. He wrote the b-side of Marianne’s “Come And Stay With Me”, with Jackie DeShannon [“What Have I Done Wrong”]. And I was in the studio when he was playing on [The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra’s] 16 Hip Hits. We were all learning on the job, but it was two or three takes and that was it.

Jimmy was like a wisp. I don’t really know what kind of a person he was, because the great ones keep it hidden and metamorphose on us, so that the room works. But he auditioned people for me. John Paul Jones auditioned Nico, but Jimmy and I co-wrote the b-side to the single [“The Last Mile”]. It should have been the a-side, because that was fucking awful [“I’m Not Sayin’”]. It really was stiff as Britain. Then he went on the road with Marianne Faithfull. We were all impressed by this new wave of women who were coming in. They weren’t like these English tea cups. Here were these teutonic forces who were incredibly strong women. They had incredible beauty and allure. But it was all about the work.

Jimmy and I never really socialized. I ran into Jimmy about four years ago on the streets of Soho and that was the first time I’d seen him since back then. I never really saw him through the Led Zeppelin period. But Zeppelin changed so much about the record business. I mean, that was the first branding, wasn’t it? Without being disrespectful to the Stones, they were the ones who opened up the stadiums. And they had the first manager who was real violence as opposed to the Mickey Mouse stuff that had been practised in England before. With the branding of Led Zeppelin, especially on American radio, there you suddenly saw all of them, and Jimmy in particular, coming into their full force of direction with a manager who was less a svengali and more of a bean-counter and leg-breaker. It changed everything. When you can be your own Diagliev, that’s pretty fucking amazing. But then look at the mess they left behind them, musically. We had to listen to a million wankers who all thought they could sound as good.

ROB HUGHES

[The Pagemeister]

LED ZEPPELIN: 'The Real Jimmy Page' Featured In UNCUT Magazine

The January 2009 issue of UK's Uncut magazine features LED ZEPPELIN guitar legend Jimmy Page on the cover. "The Real Jimmy Page" is a celebration of the life and music LED ZEPPELIN's great guitar wizard, with insights from Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, Jeff Beck, Paul Rodgers and Page himself.

[Aquamarine]

We're long overdue for an in-depth discussion of Jimmy's evolving taste in knitwear over the years. I hope Uncut fills this gap.

[beatbo]

here's part 2:

In the January issue of UNCUT, we celebrated the career of rock's greatest and most mysterious guitar hero through the first hand accounts of the people who know him best.

Here at Uncut.co.uk, we'll be posting the full and unedited transcripts from those interviews, including words from Robert Plant, Jeff Beck, Roy Harper, Steve Albini and more.

Today… DONOVAN

Page and John Paul Jones featured on many early recordings by the Zelig-like Scottish singer-songwriter, forming Zeppelin during sessions for 'Hurdy Gurdy Man'…

UNCUT: When did you first become aware of Jimmy Page?

DONOVAN: There was Big Jim and Little Jim - Big Jim Sullivan and little Jim Page. Big Jim was the no. 1 session guitarist at that time, the master of the riff, and I think he might have taken little Jim under his wing - maybe got him jobs. Maybe they'd say, “This is a job for Big Jim,” and he wouldn’t have time, he’d say, “Give it to little Jim.” It was a time when there were less producers, less session guys, and they were all pretty much jazz. I’m not sure if Jimmy was asked for specially. I didn't know him socially, because in those days sessions were three songs, three hours. He was long-legged, not-so-long-haired then, dark clothes, bohemian but quiet. Who would've thought this guy would become a giant - the great treasure of the Pagan Celtic Rock of Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

What can you tell us about the 1968 sessions for 'Hurdy Gurdy Man'?

Many people have said over the years how important that session of John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and me - and maybe Bonham, who said he was there - doing 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' was. I was developing a story-telling thing, and I wanted power-chords, because I'd obviously heard Dave Davies and Hendrix, and knew Pete Townshend. Originally I wanted to give 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' to Hendrix, but he couldn't come in. So Mickie Most suggested Jimmy. [Musical director] John Cameron told him, “All you’ve got to do is listen to Donovan’s guitar. Although it’s acoustic, the way he’s hitting it is the way the power-chords would go.” Rather than plug in, I was hitting driving chords on the acoustic in such a way that they buzz. So I guess Page listened. Jimmy added power and pagan rock. To this day, everyone wants that sound. And John Paul Jones arranged it, he gave the shapes to those sounds. And of course we really should have stopped the guitar solo, because I had another verse to sing that George Harrison had given me. But when we heard this thing that Page was doing coming out, we just said, “Keep playing…” That might have been the first power-chord solo. Mickie Most's office in Oxford Street had an adjoining door to Peter Grant’s. Maybe the band heard how 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' went…and why are we doing sessions when we can do this? And they became the greatest Pagan British Rock Band.

What about later? Did you stay in touch?

I got to know Jimmy a little bit later [in the early 1980s], when he lived near Windsor, in the house he bought, twice, from Michael Caine. He was mourning, because Bonham had died. I said, “Is that it?” He said, “That’s it. No more Zep.” He took me down to a cottage. He said, “This is the Guitar Cottage. These are my guitars.” And they were all in little cases, maybe 300. I said, “Can I open one?’ He said, “Yeah.” I said, “It’s in tune, Jimmy!” He said, “They’re all in tune…” It was Spinal Tap.

It felt like he wasn’t going to lift those guitars again?

Jimmy was quieter than I remembered him. His interest in esoterica was interesting. He was a collector of rare Aleister Crowley books, and people spoke of it as black magic. But the performance with stringed instruments comes with a tradition of philosophy and literature, and I considered him very well-read, Jimmy, and one of the three great gunslingers of our generation on the guitar, with Beck and Clapton. What distinguished him was invention; the folk style, arpeggio; and, not so much jazz, that was more Beck. But the Celtic rock, which was not like Clapton or Beck.

NICK HASTED

man, here we go again! 'hurdy gurdy man' just will not die. i WANT to believe, that solo sounds so cool, but....

....it just ain't so.

[Medhb]

Anyone in the UK willing to work out a deal obtaining and sending me a copy PLEASE pm me! A few tidbits I was able to gather:

B P Fallon: "Just because you have black swans swanning around in your moat outside doesn't mean you're in communion with Beelzebub."

Pamela Des Barres: "[in a bookshop] I found a hand-written manuscript of Crowley's tucked away. I remember feeling honoured to be sending Jimmy something so important to him. I imagined him reading it, flapping around Crowley's castle in his cape."

John Paul Jones: "I found out that he had an interest in Crowley quite early on. I didn't have the interest in it, so I left it to him. I knew he'd bought Crowley's house. He didn't talk about it much. It was a private thing. I never went there."

Kenneth Anger: "I lived in Boleskine House. I rented it for one whole summer. And that was before Jimmy Page bought it and didn't do a thing with it. Then he sold it."

Bobby Beausoleil: "Jimmy talked about Lucifer as 'a field full of beautiful flowers' - a path to self-actualisation, not evil...'

[ninelives]

Anyone in the UK willing to work out a deal obtaining and sending me a copy PLEASE pm me! A few tidbits I was able to gather:

You should be able to get this at Barnes and Noble or a decent magazine stand. They just come out in the US a few weeks after they're released overseas.

[Moonmaid]

Bobby Beausoleil: "Jimmy talked about Lucifer as 'a field full of beautiful flowers' - a path to self-actualisation, not evil...'

Whoa, whoa, whoa, I knew Beausoleil took over the Lucifer Rising soundtrack after Anger's fallout with Jimmy, but I didn't know Jimmy and Beausoleil actually spoke. He knew a Manson Family member?! (And I don't think the "Squeaky Fromme warned Jimmy about a threat on his life" story is true. She wasn't famous then, so how would anyone know it was Squeaky?)

Oh, I'm not doubting you, Med, just curious as to where that quote came from. Absolutely fascinating.

[Moonmaid]

Attempt to contact Jimmy Page

In March 1975, Fromme confronted Danny Goldberg, the publicist for English rock band Led Zeppelin, which was performing concerts in the United States as part of its North American concert tour. She said she had to see Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page because she had foreseen something evil in his future and thought it might happen that night during the band's concert at the Long Beach Arena. She swore that the last time this had happened, she had seen someone shot to death before her very eyes. Goldberg persuaded her to write a long note to Page, after which she left. The note was burned, unread.[4]

I'm totally derailing this thread, sorry, but I found this bit on Wikipedia. So...whatever...I lost my own point.

[Soccerzubs]

Quick, scan it and see if it mentions football.

(Thanks for the heads-up. )

The book I read, "When The Leeve Breaks: The Making of Led Zeppelin IV" I am pretty sure it says that all four of them used to play soccer together, but Peter Grant would never join them.

[Cofa]

Got the magazine and read it last night. It's OK but as is usually the case with these things a lot of it is just old quotes reprinted again. There are no new revelations in it that I could see.

[Bluefalcon]

Led Zep Uncut? I'm pretty sure they were all circumsized when they were babies.