Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man

George Case - 267 pps.

When I was sixteen I bought my first guitar and the guitarist I wanted to be was Jimmy Page. His playing was the fastest (seeing videos of Eddie Van Halen playing faster was like waking up when your mom puts the tooth-fairy-money under your pillow), the most expressive, and the baddest -- as in defiant, as in evil -- I'd ever heard. Sloppy perhaps, yet sublime. As with all my other heroes, I had to find out as much as I could about Jimmy Page, but all that was out there was Hammer of the Gods (which may mostly be a work of fiction, but is nonetheless still recommend). Five years later and still desperate for information, I read the book that I hoped would give rest to my Page-hungry mind. Good thing hope springs eternal in the human breast.

If you did this, you'd play sloppy too

In Jimmy Page, Case has managed to make the notoriously debaucherous career of Led Zeppelin seem like a borefest on par with ESPN8's 4-day uninterrupted coverage of the 2009 Senior PGA Championship (no pun intended). When Case isn't running through the laundry list of every concert Led Zeppelin ever played in the ten-plus years of the band's existence, he is focusing on the most boring Led Zeppelin character of all, Jimmy Page. The fact that Page comes off as a surprisingly uninteresting person in this book is perhaps not Case's fault -- it could be Jimmy's, I guess -- but Case's writing style does not help. Jimmy Page is written as a piece of journalism, as a Reuters reporter would type up one of their bulletins, except that it is filled with a lifetime's worth of bad Led Zeppelin puns. Case does almost no editorializing, and what little there is consists of his writing something along the lines of "perhaps Jimmy Page met Jeff Beck when Page was 14, but I think Jimmy Page met Jeff Beck when Page was 18." To be short, Case takes no risks in this biography, and since his research consists of few original interviews, and none with people close to Page, there is little of interest here to fans who have done even the most basic of Jimmy Page research.

Jimmy Page distills the (mostly already available) facts about Jimmy Page and all the facts point to the same conclusion: Jimmy Page as the public knows him is boring. Yes, he was into the occult, but it's possible that Page's interest could've been strictly academic. Yes, he was the architect of Led Zeppelin's sound, but it seems as if Page's passion only extended far enough to seek out an engineer who would agree to keep his name off of the album credits. And about that debauchery, yeah, Jimmy Page consumed enough alcohol, cocaine, and heroin for ten men, but as far as we know, Page's recovery from those things was as dramatic as a sunny afternoon spent with the Cleavers.

Pagey's Polar Opposite

But I'm not going to let Case off the hook just yet, and for an important reason. If I say that it wasn't Case who caused this book to be drier than the Gobi, I'd have to concede that it's my hero, Jimmy Page himself, who is too dreary to make even 100 pages of this 267 page book interesting. And I just can't accept that the man who made me want to be good at guitar is boring. Maybe I'm in denial, but when I hear the "Stairway" solo or "White Summer" I hear a man who is inspired, not a panderer only intent upon satisfying his audience. I also cannot believe that all of the shadier parts of his history -- his affinity for the occult, his penchant for girls a third of his age, his hedonistic tendencies -- were in truth so mundane as to only warrant 20 or so pages of coverage each. So sorry, George Case, but there is a much better version of Jimmy Page's biography waiting to be written, and it will have to be done by someone who takes a cue from the Sorcerer himself: someone who is willing to take the risks necessary to create enduring, or at the very least, interesting, artwork.

-Heathcliff