Imagine Dragons

From magical mirrors to mythical dragons, it was a very special Fender Telecaster that dominated JIMMY PAGE’s look and sound in the Yardbirds and early Led Zeppelin. In the following interview, Page revisits some legendary “happenings 50 years time ago.”

- Jeff Slate

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 Yardbirds 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,