Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

by Chuck Klosterman

The most straightforwardly psychedelic passage involves Page: As “Dazed and Confused” drones in the background, we see the (then) twenty-nine-year-old guitarist climbing a rock cliff on a moonlit December night, eventually reaching a wizard who’s a decrepit, kaleidoscoped version of Page himself. The footage was filmed near the Boleskine House on the shore of Loch Ness, a mansion that had once been the residence of infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley. I start to ask Page a question about this fantasy sequence. But I don’t get to finish. “I knew you were leading up to that. I knew you were eventually going to ask me what that sequence represents,” says Page. Throughout our two-day interview, he often predicts what he thinks I’m about to ask. “You have the hermit, and you have the aspirant. And the aspirant is climbing toward the hermit, who is this beacon of light. The idea is that anyone can acquire truth at any point in his life.” Jimmy Page is seventy years old. He undoubtedly knows the truth, at least about himself and the most important hard rock band that ever walked the earth. He has become the hermit on the hill. But getting the hermit to share those truths is not easy, because hermits are hermetic for a reason: They don’t trust the aspirants, and particularly not the aspirants who want to record whatever they have to say.