Setting aside things like family and small acts of joy that we take for granted, there are two things that Jimmy Page loves most in this world: guitars and dragons. As such, it’s no surprise that the Led Zeppelin guitarist combined the two and managed to create rock history in the process.
Page had an iconic guitar that he used to record all of the Led Zeppelin albums. It was a 1959 Telecaster, with a simple stripped Ash body, which the guitarist had painted over. Using green, orange, yellow, blue and red, he added a smattering of psychedelic swirls to create a dragon look on the body. The guitar became known as ‘Dragon’, and it would change rock music forever.
It was a pretty guitar and also sweet sounding; the blues tone that Fender guitars had at the time was perfect for what Led Zeppelin eventually achieved, as their twisted and more hard rock variations on the genre were enough to cement them as legends. Their sound still lives on in riffs, fills and solos to this day.
Interestingly enough, the guitar was originally a present for Page, gifted by Jeff Beck. It was initially owned by John Owen, a friend of Beck and Deltones bandmate who bought it for £107 in 1961. Beck convinced Owen to swap guitars, as he used a Burns ‘Tri-Sonic’ at the time but found it too hard to play for Deltones solos. “For a while, Owens agreed to swap,” said Martin Power in Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff Beck, “though when confronted with the difficulties of controlling the Burns’ seemingly endless knob configurations each night, [he] soon asked for his Telecaster to be returned.”
It’s unknown how Beck regained possession of the Telecaster, but he did, all the way up until the Deltones split up and he joined The Yardbirds. His go-to guitar throughout this period was the Fender Esquire, but he always had the Telecaster on hand to use as a replacement if needed.
It was in 1966 that Beck decided to gift the guitar to Page as a thank-you for helping him so much throughout his early career. Page left the guitar as it was for a year but added the iconic decorations in 1967. It’s unknown where he got the idea, but it’s not unfair to suggest it could have been Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, who decorated his Esquire with metal-style discs shortly before.
The Telecaster went on to become Page’s go-to guitar for all Led Zeppelin songs; he used it to write classics such as ‘Babe, I’m Gunna Leave You’, ‘Dazed and Confused’ and, of course, the iconic, ‘Stairway To Heaven’. The story goes that the only time he used a different guitar was on ‘You Shook Me’ because someone was trying to sell him a Gibson Flying V, so he gave it a try.
That Telecaster has become one of the pivotal components of the new resurgence of rock music. Led Zeppelin is cited as the inspiration behind many different bands who have made it big, and their influence can easily be heard in modern music if you look for it. In that sense, the Dragon is part of the fabric of rock and is a guitar which has gone on to change the world of music as we know it.
With that in mind, the way the guitar came to an end is tragic. “I still have it,” confirmed Page, “but it’s a tragic story. I went on tour with a ’59 Les Paul that I bought from Joe Walsh, and when I got back, a friend of mine had kindly painted over my paint job. He said, ‘I’ve got a present for you.’ He thought he had done me a real favour. As you can guess, I wasn’t real happy about that. His paint job totally screwed up the sound and the wiring.”
Rest in peace, Dragon. Rock will never forget you.
