IMAGINE DRAGONS
JIMMY PAGE IS as busy as ever. When we catch up with him, he’s bright-eyed and practically bouncing with excitement. He’s just loaned some of his most prized guitars to the Play It Loud! exhibition at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (including his full stage rig from Led Zeppelin’s 1977 tour), he’s contributed new interviews to a forthcoming documentary about the band helmed by American Epic director Bernard MacMahon, and, he says, he’s been working on new music.
However, his latest project — which the guitar legend says has been all-consuming over the past several years — is a unique collaboration with Fender: a soup-to-nuts recreation of his fabled 1959 “Dragon” Telecaster, gifted to him by his longtime friend Jeff Beck upon joining the Yard-birds in 1966 and used almost exclusively in crafting the genre-defining sounds captured on Led Zeppelin’s debut album, now more than 50 years ago.
“I wanted a Tele because of James Burton,” Beck recalled of the guitar. “They had such a tight sound but very warm, too. I got that guitar from John Owen for a purple Strat and somehow it became Jimmy’s. When I left the Yardbirds — in a huff, mind you — I left the guitar behind. Jimmy became the lead guitarist and had to play all my parts, so he started using it, and I guess that’s how it became his. Then he plastered it with psychedelic paint and that was that.”
Page, too, mentions Burton — and the rockabilly explosion that was happening all around him during his formative years — as a key to the draw of the Telecaster.
“The first Fender I saw was on an album in the Fifties, The “Chirping” Crickets,” Page recalls, citing Buddy Holly’s 1957 album as a formative influence. “I said, ‘My God, what is that?’ Then I saw one in a guitar showroom — one of the smaller ones — in Charing Cross Road. They had one in the window. But I don’t even know just whether I could even dream at that point that I’d ever be able to play in the region of Scotty Moore or James Burton. I was part of a whole generation of people who were seduced by the sounds of rock ’n’ roll through their radios. We heard this wild music — whether it was Little Richard or Elvis Presley, or even big band stuff, but certainly [a] more rockabilly side of it.
