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 Weighing in at just shy of 3 kg (more than six and a half
pounds) and containing some 650 photographs, "Jimmy Page" is
appropriately heavy for the man who popularized the hard-rock
guitar riff.
It is also quite costly at a recommended 40 pounds in Britain
and $60 in the United States.
But fans are fans and when a far-pricier limited-edition was
published a few years ago, it sold out quickly.
It is clear, in an interview with Reuters, that Page is proud of
the new, updated book, which begins with a picture of him
singing sweetly as a choirboy and ends with him greyed and
beaming, clutching his favorite guitar.
"It's an awful term, but it's a journey," said Page, now 70.
"You see the changes in fashion, you see the changes in guitars,
you see the changes in attitude. You see this man growing and
gaining years as he goes on this journey."
The book is far from a typical autobiography.
There are few words and those that are there are used primarily
to link hundreds of pictures tracing Page's life from skiffle-playing
youngster through The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin to his solo
career, the performance on a London bus at the 2008 Beijing
Olympics and his 2012 Kennedy Center culture award.
"It just goes to show a career in music," he said. "When I see
autobiographies or biographies of musicians I always look to see
what photographs they have chosen."
This does, perhaps unintentionally, allow the book to skim over
some of the wilder sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll episodes in his
history.
But the pictures of frenzied stage performances interspersed
with quite exhausting world travel do not suggest a bunch of
choirboys on a church outing.
All the famous gigs are there such as Wembley in 1971, Knebworth
in 1979 and the 2007 reunion, but there are many more obscure
moments, such as meeting Andy Warhol, playing in a Danish club
in 1968 as The New Yardbirds, and jamming with rapper Puff
Daddy.
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NEW MUSIC
Belying the stereotype of a hard-living rock legend, Page is now a
slim, healthy-looking non-drinker who calls a quiet Thames-side
English village home.
He says he gave up drinking because he did not want his young
children to see him drunk, and then never have done.
Page is quite sentimental about some things. Pointing to the Gibson
Les Paul Standard guitar he is holding in the book's last picture,
he says:
"I got that guitar in 1969 and I played it all the way through. Most
people, they substitute it with another one, but even at the O2
(reunion concert) I was playing that. If I was going out playing
next year, I would be playing that guitar."
Page is at his most lively in the interview when the subject of a
new band comes up. Led Zeppelin won't reform, he says.
"Next year, I will be working with musicians," he said, suggesting
that some of his recent marketing work for the book and a
remastering of some Zeppelin albums has taken him too far from his
guitar.
"I've got some (music) that's currently being written, I've got new
music which I have written over the last few years that I haven't
recorded," he said.
Scope, then, for a few more photographs to make the next edition of
"Jimmy Page" even heavier.
(Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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