Led Zeppelin at the Dawn of the Swinging Sixties
The early 1950s in Britain were grim dull years but by the time the decade ended, musicians were being heard as the dawn chorus from the Swinging Sixties.
In Britain there had been no coffee bras, no commercial tv stations, no jukeboxes, and no teenage pop stars. The young people on the 1950s were the identical 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 to the cinema. Slumped inside the stalls from the neighborhood "fleapit" they came face to face with celluloid glamour transporting them towards the fantasies of filmdom. Their early idols had been 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 inside the Swinging Sixties stemmed from that liberty.
It was these early years that spawned Led Zeppelin.
The cult of the teenager in Britain may be dated from the finish of conscription. There was no more forced discipline; kids had been able to do what they wanted, unchecked by the call of military service that moulded earlier teenagers into obedient, standard, young adults.
A huge number of teenagers took up the guitar inside the hope of emulating their idols and to play the music they loved. It was a type of rebellion.
One boy, 16-year-old Jimmy Page from Epsom, close to London, joined a group that referred to as themselves initially the Red Caps 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 friends. I was applying distinctive musicians to back me for my performances of poetry read to rock and roll accompaniment, which I named Rocketry.
Jimmy was playing guitar within a London-based group managed by Chris Tidmarsh, who later transformed himself in for the Swinging Sixties pop star, Neil Christian.
In the time I was writing a book about the big beat scene and introduced Jimmy to many with the stars featured inside the book. I was living within a rented cottage in Watchbell Street, Rye, and Jimmy plus the Red Cats employed to remain there also.
Radcliffe Hall, the lesbian author of "The Well of Loneliness" had when lived subsequent door. I acquired her topcoat and there exists a photograph of me wearing it at a rocketry efficiency at Cambridge University when a young Jimmy Page giggles in the background.
Jimmy backed me on quite a few stage and tv performances, with our last appearance together becoming in 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, however, stayed and absorbed everything that was going on inside the youth and music scene. As a result, in 1968 his energy, knowledge and talent gave the planet the unbelievable Led Zeppelin.
From being picked as a teenage guitarist to play backing music to get a beat poet, he became the fantastic music icon he remains at this time.
