“He said, ‘Caleb, I like what you're doing. I've got all this work lined up for Jimmy Page, but he doesn't want to do it anymore’”: How Elton John and Hall & Oates guitarist Caleb Quaye inherited the Led Zeppelin legend’s studio work
Jimmy Page decided to quit his lucrative career as a session guitarist in favor of joining the Yardbirds, and Quaye was right on time to take his spot
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To say that Caleb Quaye has had just “an illustrious career” would be an understatement. The English guitarist has played with the who’s who of the music industry, sessioning for Elton John, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, and Hall & Oates, to name a mere few. However, it was thanks to a certain Jimmy Page dropping out of studio work at the last minute that Quaye's playing became imprinted on some of rock's most iconic tracks.
Quaye recalls how a friend of his, singer-songwriter Billy Nicholls, was signed to Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham's Immediate label. As luck would have it, Quaye had helped Nicholls engineer some demos, so when the latter eventually recorded his first album, he enlisted Quaye to play on it.
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“Back then, everything was union musicians, and there was a contractor in the studio, David Katz, and his brother, Charlie. Charlie would be the booker for the strings, and David would be the rhythm section,” Quaye says in an upcoming Guitar World interview.
“I was there on a rhythm section date. After we finished, David said to me, the new kid on the block – I was maybe 16 – and he said, ‘Caleb, I like what you're doing. I've got all this work lined up for Jimmy Page, but he doesn't want to do it anymore.’ Jimmy was a top studio guy, but he had a meltdown, got fed up, left, and joined the Yardbirds.”
After this fateful day, Quaye landed a studio contract, and inherited all the work Page had lined up for him. However, he clarifies that he was never pressured to measure up to the future Zeppelin guitarist's sound and style. “I was free to do it as I would do it. Nobody ever said, ‘We need you to play like Jimmy,’” he clarifies.
“Like most sessions, if there was something specific written in the arrangement, they'd ask me to play that. But outside of that, I was free to do it as I wanted.”
Janelle is a staff writer at GuitarWorld.com. After a long stint in classical music, Janelle discovered the joys of playing guitar in dingy venues at the age of 13 and has never looked back. Janelle has written extensively about the intersection of music and technology, and how this is shaping the future of the music industry. She also had the pleasure of interviewing Dream Wife, K.Flay, Yīn Yīn, and Black Honey, among others. When she's not writing, you'll find her creating layers of delicious audio lasagna with her art-rock/psych-punk band ĠENN.
