Jimmy Page and the first signs of Zeppelin

OK, now I can't stop myself. But these things are so fun to hunt down and I want to share, because there probably aren't that many people who are going to wade through all the junk - or even think to look for it. And there IS a lot of junk. But this is Jimmy Page with his inherited band, The Yardbirds, live on French TV in 1968, doing a very early version of Jake Holmes' "Dazed and Confused" that sounds more like the unformed Zeppelin than it did the established Yardbirds. Check out his playing on the break! Damn! But poor Jim McCarty on drums - Bonham would soon relegate his kind to the rubbish bin of history.

Note, too, his Hendrix-influenced frilly shirt...



Here's Page leading the band through another song from the Jeff Beck era, "Shapes of Things." Again, Page's sounds are just so big for this group.



And if you've not seen it before, here's the infamous footage of the Yardbirds during the brief period in which Page and Beck played twin lead guitars, though it's obviously mimed, not live. It was filmed for inclusion in Antonioni's wonderful suspense film, "Blow Up," and was, in fact, the low-point of the film, with the bizarre club scene, no one even responding to the band. Was that intentional, a comment on the zombie nature of Swinging London?