The Zeppelin legend spoke to Total Guitar’s Chris Bird in 2020
Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in 1975(Image credit: Getty Images/Laurance Ratner)
“I’m pleased you’ve enjoyed the book,” Jimmy Page said. “You know, being a guitar nerd like myself.”
It was 2020, and the legendary guitarist was talking about Jimmy Page: The Anthology, a weighty publication which he described as “an autobiography with photographs”.
The ‘guitar nerd’ he was talking to was Chris Bird, editor of Total Guitar magazine.
Five years after their meeting — on 27 May 2025 — Chris Bird died at the age of 48.
His interview with Page was one of the highlights of his career.
This was an epic, 8000-word cover story in which Page discussed every aspect of his life’s work: the groundbreaking music he made, first with The Yardbirds and then with Led Zeppelin; and the tools of his trade, iconic guitars such as the Black Beauty, and the amps and effects with which he explored new sounds.
What follows here is an edited version of the fascinating, in-depth conversation that those two guitar nerds enjoyed together…
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Chris Bird: One guitar in particular — your 1960 Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty Custom — has an amazing story.
Jimmy Page: The first time I played it, I had such a connection with it. I thought, ‘This is it. After all this searching and going through guitar shops, this is the one.’ I got it before I went to art college, so when I started doing studio work as a session player, that’s the electric that’s used on pretty much all of that work.
You also played it during Led Zeppelin’s famous concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall in January 1970.
Yes, at the tail end of it when we did some Eddie Cochran stuff. And after the Albert Hall, I thought I’d take it to the States with me on one of the tours and we’d just do all this rock ’n’ roll stuff at the end, the Eddie Cochran stuff with the Bigsby. So the story is that I take it over there, we’re in Minneapolis going to Montreal, and we arrive in Montreal but the guitar doesn’t. It disappears in Minneapolis. I realised it was lost or stolen.
And then?
Gibson, under the circumstances of me having played all the studio work on a Gibson Black Beauty, they made a clone of that, a version of it. That was pretty cool. And I had some extra sort of routing in it, because on the original, where you have the up [position on the selector switch] it is the neck [pickup]. The middle [position] isn’t the neck and the bridge, it’s actually the bridge and the middle pickup. And then the down position is the bridge. So at no point could you get what you’d get on a Standard, which was the neck and bridge pickup together, so I worked out a way of doing that, and I had that built into that particular model, because I thought, well, crikey, you want to do that, you want any combination that you can get. So that was what I had, a Gibson Black Beauty
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