What was the first song to feature Jimmy Page on guitar?
Jimmy Page is renowned as one of the best and most influential musicians of the late sixties and 1970s for his inimitable body of work as Led Zeppelin’s guitarist. Yet he was already a seasoned player long before his Zeppelin days.
In his early twenties, Page was a member of progenitors of British blues and psychedelic rock The Yardbirds. He joined the group in 1966 after Eric Clapton had left, but played alongside virtuoso blues guitarist Jeff Beck, including on the single ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’.
Even before The Yardbirds, though, Page was a well-oiled guitar machine, performing regularly as a session musician for generational artists like The Kinks, The Who, Van Morrison’s Them and The Rolling Stones while barely out of his teens.
He certainly played on The Who’s iconic debut single ‘I Can’t Explain’, and much of the debut album by The Kinks. Page apparently also claims to have played on The Kinks’ early garage rock anthem ‘All Day and All of the Night’, although the band’s lead singer Ray Davies disputes this claim.
Yet these British invasion bands still weren’t the first artists Page recorded with. Aged just 18, Page was picked up by Decca Records song arranger Mike Leander. “I got into sessions, certain things were asked of me, but I was at art college,” Page explained to Reverb in 2020. “I’d come out of the music thing, touring with groups and all of that, and I was just enjoying playing the guitar, playing the harmonica, and listening to more and more of the Chess catalogue.”
Recording engineer Glyn Johns put Page forward for his very first session. It was the recording of the rock and roll instrumental ‘Diamonds’ by Shadows members Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. The session was produced by Meehan at Decca Studios in Hampstead, North London, in November 1962.
Foundational moments
This recording predates any other studio session by virtually all of the other successful British rock stars who would come to define the 1960s, The Beatles aside. Even Liverpool’s Fab Four had only recorded one relatively unsuccessful UK single by this point. They had also been rejected by the label studio, which had just hired Page to play at their studio.
In this sense, Jimmy Page was far ahead of his time. And so were his signature jagged guitar sound, his mastery of the instrument and his extensive knowledge of rhythm and blues. While the likes of Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Van Morrison and George Harrison often get held up as teenage guitar prodigies beyond their years, Page was younger than all of them when he laid his first guitar part down on record.
If you want to find a guitar who spans the entire progression of the guitar as a vehicle for first rock and roll, then British invasion, garage, blues and folk rock, as well as psychedelic and later hard rock, look no further. Jimmy Page has played it all. And mastered it.