News The attempted onstage assassination of Jimmy Page
No artist thinks they will be risking their lives doing what they love. Outside of maybe a few dangerous bouts with pyrotechnics, very few of the biggest names in music are known to sustain injuries when they are onstage, more often living their biggest excesses the minute they get off the stage. While Jimmy Page has gone through enough excessive behaviour to kill any common man’s immune system, he wasn’t safe from an unknown madman with a knife.
By the time Page’s life was in danger, though, Led Zeppelin had already been etched firmly into rock history. After the tragic death of John Bonham in the 1980s, the band elected not to continue with the rest of the surviving members out of respect for his memory, leaving Page without a steady gig for the first time since his teenage years.
While getting through Bonham’s death, Page opted to make a name for himself with another supergroup. Working with Paul Rodgers of Bad Company, The Firm was the next major play for Page, bringing out a handful of his trademark Zeppelin tricks like the violin bow across the strings when working on some of their biggest songs.
The group’s success even got the approval of Robert Plant, who remembered seeing his old mate play and being astounded by how he sounded up there with a fellow blues rock legend in front of him. Maybe it was the nostalgia, but that may have given Plant the itch to mess around with another lineup of the band when the 1990s rolled around.
Outside of lending his skills to the Puffy Daddy track ‘Come With Me’, fans got a hint of Zeppelin sentimentality when Page teamed up with Plant to go on a joint tour together. While the band would occasionally sprinkle in bits and pieces of Zeppelin’s catalogue, the majority of the songs were original material and blues favourites they had loved from their youth.
Everything seemed to be going well until the band reached Auburn Hills, Michigan. As much as Zeppelin may have accumulated fans worldwide, they got more than a few detractors, too, and one of them showed up that night to try and put Page in his place.
Since Page had been interested in the occult throughout his time with Zeppelin, the unknown assailant approached the stage with the belief that Page was in league with Satan. Although ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was one of the first instances of ‘Satanic Panic’ that started in the early 1970s, none of the band claimed that they used any sort of dark magic to get their greatest hits, usually relying on the same blues-infused foundation they loved as kids.
That wasn’t enough for this concertgoer, who stormed the stage with a knife with the intent of carving Page up. While security was able to get to the would-be assassin before Page sustained any injuries, some of the concertgoers would not be so lucky, with four of them walking away with a handful of stab wounds from the knife.
Of course, this was far from the first time that musicians had been called into question regarding their religious beliefs. Since this had come a decade after Ozzy Osbourne was getting called an antichrist because of him biting the heads off bats and doing unspeakable things on the road, the religious fanatics of the world saw it fit to eradicate them from the Earth, thinking what they were doing was God’s will. Despite all of the questionable behaviour that Page may have indulged in over the years, one’s moral compass is definitely skewed if they thought that killing someone would make the world a better place.
