Jeff Beck’s health has been poor since the beginning of the Yardbirds’ tour in the summer of 1966, but that ultimately providing a sneak peek of what lay ahead for the band as Jimmy Page came to the fore.
In fact, that tour began a week late because of Beck’s tonsillitis. Worn down and frustrated — both with the endless touring, and the technological shortcomings of the age — a raging Beck took to wrecking his equipment on stage. Finally, as the group reached San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom, Beck’s ailing body gave out.
To this point, a young Jimmy Page had been playing bass for the Yardbirds. On this night, he’d be called to the stage to take over for Jeff Beck. Not that the crowd was all that excited.
“Jeff couldn’t do the gig, because he wasn’t well,” stalwart Yardbirds leader Jim McCarty has said. “They put this announcement out, before we came on that said Jeff Beck can’t do the gig, so the bass player is going to play lead guitar. Of course, the bass player was Jimmy Page! Everyone thought, ‘Well, this is going to be a real bummer.”
Instead, one of rock’s most dynamic new voices was finally getting this chance to shine. Though, as Page subsequently admitted, it wasn’t the easiest of transitions. He had, after all, come to the Yardbirds as a studio ace, not a concert star.
History shows, however, that Jimmy Page got the hang of it pretty quickly. “When Jeff recovered,” Page noted years later in Hot Wired, “it was two lead guitars from then on.”
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