“The first time I played it, I had such a connection with it. I thought, ‘This is it. This is the one’”: On his 26th birthday in 1970, Jimmy Page played his beloved Les Paul Custom ‘Black Beauty’ at the climax of a legendary Led Zeppelin show

On 9 January 1970, Jimmy Page celebrated his 26th birthday by performing with Led Zeppelin at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

It was a landmark show for the band, captured on film and later featured in their official 2003 DVD.

As Page would recall to writer Cameron Crowe, the Royal Albert Hall was “at the time the largest and most prestigious gig in London”.

Zeppelin’s show at the venue in 1970 was part of short, 8-date UK tour. The setlist featured key tracks from the band’s first two albums, including Dazed And Confused, Heartbreaker, Communication Breakdown, Moby Dick, Thank You and Whole Lotta Love. Also included was a track from the as-yet-unreleased Led Zeppelin III – the classic blues number Since I've Been Loving You.

For the encore, the band played a medley of rock ’n’ roll standards including Eddie Cochran’s C’mon Everybody and Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally.

And it was during this encore medley that Page played one of his most iconic electric guitars – a 1960 Gibson Les Paul Custom 'Black Beauty'.

In 2020, Page talked about that famous gig and that famous guitar in an interview with Total Guitar editor Chris Bird.

Page said of the Black Beauty: “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.”

He recalled playing the Black Beauty at the Albert Hall – “At the tail end of it when we did some Eddie Cochran stuff”.

He then told the story of how this treasured guitar was lost and then found many years later.

He said: “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.”

He continued the story: “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 [replica].”

In 2008, Gibson released the Custom Shop VOS edition of Page’s Bigsby-equipped Black Beauty, complete with a trio of signature BurstBucker humbuckers and the unique six-way pickup switch that makes it so versatile. This limited edition model (they only made 500 of them) now fetches silly money online.

It did the job for Page. He played the replica during Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion show at London’s O2 arena.

“That’s the guitar that I played at the O2,” he said, “when we did For Your Life [from Zeppelin’s 1976 album Presence]. I thought that would be really cool, that thick sound, because it sounded really good.

Led Zeppelin - For Your Life (Celebration Day) - YouTube

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“And then after the O2 [in 2015], my guitar that was stolen turns up. It gets found. Isn’t that interesting? And unless you get the story, you just see a Black Beauty and think, oh that’s the same one he had before. But there’s a whole story about how it gets lost and I didn’t expect it ever to be back in my hands ever again. I thought it was gone.”

What had happened to it in all that time?

Page explained: “I think it was stolen from the airport and it was stuck under somebody’s bed, somebody who was in some sort of punk band or something, and nobody wanted to rat on him. I think he died, and once he died things became a bit more apparent as to what had happened, and we got it back.”

Page’s Les Paul Custom made its return to public life in 2019 when it was included at the Play It Loud exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now that Gibson and Page have embarked on a multi-year partnership, releasing replicas of his iconic EDS-1275 Doubleneck and 1964 SJ-200 acoustic, might see a reissue of his 1960 Black Beauty replica?