“I obviously knew what tape sounded like when you played it backwards”: Missing vs. Getting The Point With Jimmy Page

For starters: presenting the above quote as the lede = “Missing The Point.”

"Don't get it all backwards."

I've taken deep sonic enjoyment from Page's recent tweaked re-releases of the first five Led Zeppelin albums. So, apparently, have the MSM. Sometimes things align that way.

Page has agreed to a number of interviews, and his guarded chin-wag with Chuck Klosterman for GQ is getting a lot of link-love. I'm frankly baffled by the adulation. The central defining element in the profile is Klosterman's determined obtuseness — it's a more telling profile of Klosterman than it is of Page.

Hey, I'd love to hear Page wax on at length about The Freaky Shit. But he's not going to indulge that  — will, in fact, get very prickly very quickly when an interviewer attempts to broach the subject of the occult, or drugs, or bad behaviour on the road. And a reader of Page doesn't need to delve all that deeply to understand why he's sensitive about any potentially sensational matter — anything peripheral to the music, the sound, which he considers the defining element of his life, is a distraction.

Every few years, when Tony Bennett gets asked about somebody like Amy Winehouse, he'll refer to his own struggles with addiction, and say he received a moment of clarity when Lenny Bruce's former manager said, “He [Bruce] sinned against his own talent.”

I imagine Page experienced a similar moment, probably around '79-'80.

Keep the focus on talent, and Page happily opens up. Luke Turner shows us how it's done.