Paul McCartney likes to explain the sleuth-like method by which he, John Lennon and George Harrison learned new chords in their Liverpool days. In the absence of an internet — not to mention guitar magazines and lesson books — they would get wind of another guitarist who had solved the mystery of a particular triad and travel by bus some distance to receive this new key, unlocking yet another dimension of the guitar’s fretboard.
IT WAS A SIMILAR sort of quest that brought Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page together when they were both about 16 or 17, around 1960 or 1961. Beck’s sister, Annetta, told him about a kid at her art college in Epsom who played a “funny guitar” like his, and she decided they should meet. As it happened, Page lived all of about 10 minutes away. “There was a knock on the door, and there was Jeff’s sister, and there was Jeff holding his homemade guitar,” Page recalled in a 2019 video for Fender. “We just bonded immediately.”
Page would soon launch his career as a session musician, a move that would bring him success, money and some small measure of fame. Beck, meanwhile, would work his way through a string of groups, from the Deltones to the Tridents. But while the latter act was keeping busy. “But there was no way I could exist — they weren’t paying me anything.”
