Any other guitarist would consider working with Jimmy Page to be one of the highlights of their entire career.
Even outside of Led Zeppelin, Page was a wizard whenever he had a guitar in his hand, and every single riff that he could think of would have been worthy to be one of the best things that any lesser rock and roll band had ever recorded. But even if there were plenty of artists who tried to steal their style from Page, he remembered that not everyone was exactly that fond of what he was doing, even in his prime.
Hell, before he even had the rest of his band behind him, a lot of people reacted to him forming a new group with an eyeroll half the time. That sounds insane to think about today, but when looking at what the rest of The Yardbirds had been doing, some naive kid talking about how he was going to create one of the best rock and roll bands the world had ever seen would have gone over as a lead balloon like Keith Moon had talked about.
While every single person who turned Page down needed to eat some humble pie after he became one of the biggest artists in the world, Page didn’t want to stop at simple rock and roll. He had his eye on going even further than where everyone else was, and that meant moving into the world of film as well. But if you look at The Song Remains the Same, there are more than a few times where the ideas that they had didn’t really come together as they should have.
The sequences of them performing are great, but watching them find their fantastical alter egos is a bit of a stretch coming from a band that was all about live performance. The film itself was a bit over-indulgent at times, but if Page thought the final result left a lot to be desired, working with Kenneth Anger was going to be a whole different mess for him to deal with once he helped get Lucifer Rising off the ground.
It’s no secret that Page was interested in the occult at the time, but working with the experimental filmmaker on his movie was about more than writing a check. George Harrison may have been able to fund Monty Python’s The Life of Brian because he wanted to see it, but after Anger got more and more frustrated with where he was in the film, Page didn’t appreciate being thrown under the bus when the production was over.
As far as the guitarist could tell, Anger was going to make the film that he wanted to make, and he didn’t appreciate the director walking all over him in the process, saying, “What a snide bastard. His stuff was just all over the place and I just got some roadies to get it all together for him. Christ, he even turned that one round against me. I had a lot of respect for him. As an occultist he was definitely in the vanguard. I just don’t know what he’s playing at. I’m totally bemused and really disgusted. It’s truly pathetic. I mean, he is powerless – totally. The only damage he can do is with his tongue.”
Then again, maybe it was just a case of Anger not knowing exactly what he wanted. Any experimental film like this was going to have its ups and downs in terms of production, but when looking at the pieces that Page wanted to use, it’s not like he was being a dictator by any means. He was willing to give this a shot, but sometimes partnerships like this don’t come together like they’re supposed to.
But in the age of Physical Graffiti and Presence, the fact that Page ended up working with Anger in the first place really showed his frail state of mind at the time. He was about to go down a very dark road, and the rest of the world was only left to watch everything play out before John Bonham’s death brought everything to a halt.
