1980: 1981: 1982: 1983: 1984: 1985: 1986: 1987: 1988: 1989:

1970: 1971: 1972: 1973: 1974: 1975: 1976: 1977: 1978: 1979:

1960: 1961: 1962: 1963: 1964: 1965: 1966: 1967: 1968: 1969:

So, a little birthday tribute. I give you. . . Jimmy Page through the ages. Early days:

Unlikely - Krissy's son by Ronnie Wood (Jesse) was born in October 1976, so it seems safe to assume that by early 1976 at the latest she and Ronnie were back together and her thing with Jimmy was over. Also Ronnie Wood in his autobiography describes her as breaking her back in the summer of 1977 (Ronnie's chronology is sometimes vague and sometimes flat-out wrong, but I'm pretty sure he's saying summer of '77), so I guess she was out of circulation for a bit. According to him, after breaking her back she berated him for leaving her again (this time for Jo Wood, who he'd met earlier in '77) and wanted to get back with him, so I guess that implies it was over with Jimmy.

I don't think it's naturally curly - it never looks so in any of the pics from the Yardbirds days or earlier. Pamela mentioned his "little crimping machine", which sounds right to me - throughout the 70s the degree of curliness / waviness varies quite a bit, like it's been styled in different ways. (Also, I'm naturally wavy-haired too and I've got to say his curls often look to uniform and perfect to be the real deal. Painful experience has taught me that very rarely do you wake up without some of your natural waves refusing to lie the right way or something - half the time you just look like you've been dragged through a hedge). Then he had those awful perms in the 80s and 90s. . . these days there's sometimes a bit of curl there but usually not (the curls came and went a bit after he went grey but before it got to ponytail-length), which points to it being faked.

I know, right? Only man who ever looked cool in a sleeveless cardigan (a garment I would usually associate with my granddad).

http://www.orkut.com/Main#CommMsgs?tid=2479969489591041026&cmm=14003953&hl=en-GB Q: Your best and worst haircut? JP: The worst decision was not cutting my hair before doing the Unledded project [with Robert Plant in 1994]. I should have cut it five years before. And it was incredibly long at Led Zeppelin's Albert Hall gig in '70 [as featured on 2003's DVD]. It was verging on the realm of [curly-haired ukulele-playing singer] Tiny Tim at that stage. That's not a fashion high point. So right about 1994 (the inspiration at that point was Bozo the clown, I reckon); so wrong about 1970. It was beautiful.

Nothing to do with Lovelace - I believe this pic was taken in Sweden in 1970, and the Lovelace thing wasn't until 1975. I love how the other three are just standing about with their drinks and acting like they don't even notice, trying to be all cool and sophisticated about it. . . and Jimmy's just blatantly checking out the girl.

It's by far the best book about the band, IMO. I guess what's "special" is that it's more or less entirely an oral history of the band (Hoskyns has his little introductory bits at the top of each section to set the scene, but mostly it's just "in their own words"), so you don't have the usual thing of someone trying to tidy a long and messy story and people's inconveniently messy personalities and so on into a coherent narrative and impose their own views about life, the universe, rock and roll and whatever else onto it, which is usually the way with biographies. He's interviewed a LOT of people who knew them (before, during and after the Zeppelin years) - and, crucially, in a lot of different contexts. Musicians, producers, business / finance people, friends, lovers, photographers, girls who worked in the office at Swan Song, you name it. And he's incredibly clever in the way he splices the different comments together - the way that sometimes you have two comments that basically say the same thing and back each other up, and other times you have two which seem to directly contradict each other (just read some of the comments about Bonham and you wouldn't believe they were about the same person). It's like a hologram; you get light fired at the subject from about a hundred different angles, and somewhere in the middle is a three-dimensional image, which you mostly construct yourself (with some subtle help from Hoskyns). There's no mystical crap; no "Led Zeppelin literally or metaphorically sold their souls and paid the price" kind of annoying bollocks. It reveals a mundane truth, which is that what did for the band was: a.) Very, very bad luck (Plant's accident, and then his family tragedy); and b.) Addictions (Page's, Bonham's, and, not insignificantly, Grant's) - and it really is as mundane as that. Hoskyns clearly adores the band and their music, and is awesome at conveying the absolute glory of the good times, but he isn't too in awe to face up to some of the more sordid realities. It's a wonderful book, and I hope it becomes established as the definitive book on the band, rather than Hammer Of The Gods or some such crap.

Fancy chocolates. Pretty sure those are Charbonnel et Walker boxes up top. Divine make bars half way down. Probably his only vice now he's so clean living and all.

That last one's taken in the US or Canada I think. Somewhere with sequoias or other really huge trees...

Oh I do, now you mention - Mr Coffin(!)

Yeah, it does look professional - the lighting and everything, plus of course it wouldn't have been permissible for people to just start taking snaps during a service (and look at that pitch-black background - what are they doing, having a service in a power cut?). . . perhaps there was a feature on the choir in the local press or something like that. Or (more likely I reckon, as he's the only kid in the picture and a paper would more likely have wanted a group shot), they had some professional pictures (or at least posed pictures, taken by a talented amateur) taken for the kids' parents, like they do at school. Either that or it was his mum taking a picture at home, with the lights out and a candle she had lying around, just because she wanted a shot of him in the choirboy get-up (I mean, you would, wouldn't you, if it was your little boy looking so angelic). Then naturally Jimmy's parents would have treasured it forever...

The uncorrupted choirboy. . .

I'm sure I read one version of events which described him as "daring" them to arrest him. So he might have said something like "go on then, arrest me" in bravado - but it wasn't actually what he wanted. Or he might have been more contrite, and said it in a "do what you have to do, I'll come quietly, get it over with" kind of a way. Like, insisting he didn't want special treatment or something - "you're just doing your job, if you have to do it, go ahead" kind of thing. But the idea that he WANTED to be arrested seems totally implausible. I mean, you can just about imagine how someone with a serious addiction problem - someone on hard drugs - might want that. Because they think it's the only way they're going to get help, they know they won't change their ways unless they're forced to, they fear they're going to kill themselves if they're not forcibly restrained from accessing the stuff etc. But I can't come up with any plausible reason at all why someone who was just pissed and smoking would actually want that. The whole smoking ban on planes is kind of stupid. I mean, there's always going to be a certain percentage of people who are scared of flying (Jimmy definitely was at one point - don't know if it improved any with age), and a certain percentage of those will be smokers whose usual coping strategy when feeling jittery is to have a fag. If you deny them that, then they just self-medicate by drinking too much. Air rage incidents have shot up since the complete ban on smoking on planes, and so has the rate of people picking up infections on planes, because they're recycling the air (and any viruses and bacteria that are in it) more - when there's smoking on a plane, they legally have to completely change the air more frequently. Airlines would save themselves a lot of grief if they brought back smoking sections. Either that or make it standard practice to hand out nicotine sprays or something.

There's something odd about this one - the trousers are kind of see-through and it looks like the stripy material of the shirt goes right down his legs. Like he's wearing a jumpsuit or something. Was this a thing in the sixties - shirts with matching long johns?!

I just finished Buell's book and I don't remember that - is it from a recent interview?

This looks like a hamburger. . . I think Pamela Des Barres also made reference to him moaning about "eating hamburger" on tour. So perhaps he'd ceased to be a rigid vegetarian quite early on in the Led Zeppelin period. (It must have been difficult on tour in that period - a lot of places just wouldn't have a vegetarian option on the menu. So perhaps it was a case of being veggie when possible and slipping a bit when not).

But wasn't their son born in 1991?

“Ronnie Wood says now that he, too, had been approached by Page to become the bassist in the New Yardbirds. ‘But I didn’t fancy that at all,’ he grimaces, putting out one cigarette to light another. ‘All that heavy stuff wasn’t my bag at all […]. I wanted to play guitar again. Joining Jimmy would have been like playing with Jeff [beck], stuck on bass. And anyway, there was only ever going to be one guitarist in a group like [Led Zeppelin] – and it wasn’t going to be me.’” - From "When Giants Walked The Earth" “Although Peter [Grant] didn’t treat the rest of us as well as he treated Jeff and himself, he did in the early days offer me the chance of being in a band other than the Jeff Beck Group. He told me that a bunch of blokes were putting a band together and intended to call themselves The New Yardbirds. Peter said, ‘They want you as their guitar player’. Well, I’d met a few of them at his office, including the rude drummer John Bonham, who reminded me of a farmer, bassist John Paul Jones and the harmless enough Robert Plant, and I told Peter, ‘No, I’m happy where I am, thanks’. He insisted, ‘This is an offer you really must consider’. I considered it for two seconds, and then told him again, ‘No way’. The New Yardbirds hired Jimmy Page instead and changed their name to Led Zeppelin.” - Ronnie Wood in “Ronnie”, his autobiography I just flicked through “Ronnie” today and just wondered what the hell that second quote is about. I mean, the idea that the other three members (none of whom had been in the Yardbirds, so why on earth would they be calling themselves that?) were assembled and then started looking for a guitarist is so completely the opposite of what we know to be true. It’s impossible that Wood would even have bought that at the time, let alone thirty-odd years later (the book’s from 2007). The account doesn’t even match Wood’s own account in “When Giants Walked The Earth”. (Which merely says that Page was in the early stages of putting a band together, and that Wood might have been in the frame for bassist before Jones came along, if he’d wanted). So what is the deal with this? Page, after having already assembled the whole group, was seriously considering having it be a two-guitar band, and told Grant to test the water whilst keeping his name out of it? Grant was testing Wood’s loyalty, or otherwise playing some weird head game with him? Or it’s just Wood using his book to have some kind of peculiar in-joke with Page?

The thread is started: http://forums.ledzeppelin.com/index.php?/topic/20062-led-zeppelin-slept-here/

This is cool. Do you have any similar lists for other US tours (or does anyone?)