Led Zeppelin at the Dawn of the Swinging Sixties
The early 1950s in Britain had been grim dull years but by the time the decade ended, musicians were getting heard because the dawn chorus on the Swinging Sixties.
In Britain there had been no coffee bras, no commercial television stations, no jukeboxes, and no teenage pop stars. The young men and women in the 1950s had been the same as they had been for generations previous. They had been quiet, ordinary embryo adults plodding without having interference to maturity.
Their spare time was spent on sport, ballroom dancing, or on visits for the cinema. Slumped inside the stalls of your local "fleapit" they came face to face with celluloid glamour transporting them towards the fantasies of filmdom. Their early idols were US film stars, not record stars.
Bill Haley and Elvis Presley changed that in Britain and then home-grown pop stars like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard attracted the fans.
The abolition in 1960 in Britain from the compulsory two years military National Service for 18-year-olds had a liberating impact on teenagers. It was a taste of freedom; the excesses that resulted in the Swinging Sixties stemmed from that liberty.
It was those early years that spawned Led Zeppelin.
The cult in the teenager in Britain is often dated from the end of conscription. There was no more forced discipline; kids were able to do what they wanted, unchecked by the call of military service that moulded previous teenagers into obedient, standard, young adults.
A huge number of teenagers took up the guitar within the hope of emulating their idols and to play the music they loved. It was a kind of rebellion.
One boy, 16-year-old Jimmy Page from Epsom, close to London, joined a group that known as themselves very first the Red Caps and then, as that sounded rather square -- it was the name of a brand of milk -- the Red Cats.
In 1960, I met Jimmy Page and we became good friends. I was working with distinct musicians to back me for my performances of poetry read to rock and roll accompaniment, which I called Rocketry.
Jimmy was playing guitar in a London-based group managed by Chris Tidmarsh, who later transformed himself in to the Swinging Sixties pop star, Neil Christian.
At the time I was writing a book concerning the significant beat scene and introduced Jimmy to lots of in the stars featured within the book. I was living inside a rented cottage in Watchbell Street, Rye, and Jimmy and also the Red Cats utilized to keep there also.
Radcliffe Hall, the lesbian author of "The Nicely of Loneliness" had once lived subsequent door. I acquired her topcoat and there exists a photograph of me wearing it at a rocketry overall performance at Cambridge University although a young Jimmy Page giggles within the background.
Jimmy backed me on lots of stage and television performances, with our last look together being inside a show at London's Mermaid Theatre in July 1961.
By that time I was 20 and no longer a teenager. My book was published and it seemed time to move on. I left England and escaped the Swinging Sixties.
Jimmy, nevertheless, stayed and absorbed almost everything that was going on inside the youth and music scene. As a result, in 1968 his energy, experience and talent gave the globe the incredible Led Zeppelin.
From being picked as a teenage guitarist to play backing music to get a beat poet, he became the terrific music icon he remains currently.
