I'm here to right those wrongs. Last year, I wrote a short piece about Jimmy in a series on British guitarists, and I've built on the early part of that here. It's hardly exhaustive research, but I thought it might interest a few people, so I took the time to knock it out and research and provide the links to flesh the (very) basics out.
Jimmy learned a lot of his trade from the best guitar session man of the time, "Big" Jim Sullivan, often playing the same sessions together, as on Dave Berry's "The Crying Game, with Big Jim playing the lead, and using a double neck, while "Little" Jim, as he became known, played rhythm.
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This is a great article, and if you don't know already, be prepared to be amazed at some of the classic releases that Little Jim played on. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, more. Needless to say, as a confirmed music geek, I lap stuff like this up. The mention of "Beck's Bolero" is particularly pertinent, as is P.J. Proby's "Jim's Blues".
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/jimmy-page-before-led-zeppelin-20-great-sixties-session-songs-151465/
As you can see, his "career" started a long time before he replaced Paul Samwell-Smith in the Yardbirds (on bass), but what came before certainly explains why they'd been trying to recruit him for a couple of years prior to his joining them.
This video is quite good too if you can ignore the awful voiceover.
Viv Prince, who gets a blink-and-you'll-miss-it photo credit in the above video was a drummer with the Pretty Things and influenced Keith Moon... his behaviour more than his drumming. In 1963 he became the first British rock musician against whom a drug-related charge was brought up in the court.
According to Jimmy Page, Prince was also the one to coin the nickname "Moon the Loon" for Keith.
It's also been said that Viv was expelled from the Hell's Angels for bad behaviour in the late sixties.
The sixties really were a "different time" in so many more ways than just the obvious, and I've often thought that if I were ten years older I'd have had a brilliant time with the music scene that was happening, and I'd undoubtedly be dead by now.
If you'd like to learn more, that's why God gave us Google.
